The Wolverine

a) I recall seeing the new Wolverine movie today, and apart from the CGI bear at the beginning that probably should have belonged to a Müller rice commercial, I liked the movie very much and thought it was wonderfully stylish, I liked the Japanese setting, the two main Japanese women in it and the Samurai robot suit in the movie. 

b) There probably is not much to be said about the story other than I couldn't really find a way to pick at it seeing what it was as a movie. Probably the end was a little bit too comic bookish but who cares about some of the things that seem problematic, they were easily looked over by myself. How it might compare to the comic books might be a completely different matter if this particular story has its source there but  I certainly haven't read the comic books indeed and don't seem to have developed any interest since seeing this film. 

actress Rila Fukushima

c) It seems that the actress Rila Fukushima who was in the film had done little else before this film as an actress so I am not going to start looking out for films that have starred her in the past killing people with swords,  but if she had, I would be collecting all the blu-rays. 

d) The mutant villain of the film didn't interest me in the slightest but the metal suit of the other villain did interest me and it could be anyone in the metal suit, I wasn't interested in the person that was within. The Silver Samurai character's suit design probably was quite wonderful and maybe a bigger thing ought to have been made out of it.

e) It might be too insulting to the film to have any real intellectual view about it.

f) The very lovely Miss Tryon informed me that the sight of Hugh Jackman in the poster wandering around without a shirt on or anything on top inspired her to want to knit a "woolly pulloverine" for him . 

actress Rila Fukushima

 

Sarah Polley's shape shifting documentary

(written 14th August) I managed to finally see the Sarah Polley film "Stories We Tell" and was very glad to have been part of the cinema audience for this film

I managed to see the documentary film Stories We Tell directed by Sarah Polley. I write this as I don't know what to say about the film other than I have seen it, I witnessed the movie. I admit that I didn't go to see the film to learn about Diane Polley so much but to find out something that was to cause a shift in Sarah Polley's life and indeed find out about who Diane Polley was on the way which I believe I have succeeded in and also found out who the rest of Sarah's are.

It was a strange scenario perhaps, all these years having been a fan of Sarah Polley since her appearance in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, , having seen episodes of  The Road To Avon Lea, and watched her in Atom Egoyan's movies such Exotica and especially The Sweet Hereafter in which she provides songs to enchant her fans with her silvery voice. She has become a film director. But now we find her peeling away the origins of her life

What was first of all a film about people such as her family recounting their memories of her mother

Coming to find this out probably changes for a while everything one might have thought about Sarah Polley who she was in terms of her roots but she remains as the daughter of Michael Polley since he was the one who brought her up, and the news about Harry Gulkin being her biological father seemed to have brought Sarah Polley back together with Michael Polley as some distancing had been going on over time. And indeed Michael remains philosophical and accepts what had gone on in the past without regrets. In the film Harry Gulkin wanted to release a book about his relationship with Diane Polley which Sarah appears to stop in its tracks from being released. He also wanted the documentary to only be about his story of his love affair with Diane Polley and Sarah would not accept this since it was a documentary about everyone's perspectives.

Being a witness to this film almost brings one into being entangled with something of the unspoken confusion that must have gone on as everyone finds a way to reassemble their lives which led to the breakup of the marriages of Sarah Polley and her two sisters now half sisters.

Diane Polley who died when she was eleven, the story turns around when she discovers that her mother seemed to have had an affair with another man at one point when the marriage had grown week and so it seemed that this man would have been her father so that meant the man that she grew up believing was her father Michael Polley was no longer biologically so. She soon discovers who her biological father is, Harry Gulkin a film maker / writer of Russian Jewish background, and finds the similarities between them that might be genetic or indeed coincidence, and so then comparing herself to half sister by her biological father she finds the origin of her gummy smile and her half sister is someone she is able to get on with..

The oddity of what went on in the documentary can only be fully appreciated by watching the whole thing rather than reading a review by myself and my fragmented perception of the movie, and one is brought faced to face with these different people brought together in a film because of a curious situation regarding this globally relevant young woman from Canada. One might continue to ponder over the whole thing, and it might just be a thing that can take place in the lives of many people and soon the truth may surface but also as a documentary, it's curious how the project transformed from one thing to another along the way and revealed curious aspects normally unrevealable about the film maker herself not intended to be brought to the surface but only comes through in the ironic remarks made by her family.

Sarah Polley indeed never fails to continue to make a major contribution to the collective consciousness by digging deep within to reveal a precious stone that is herself, and also those around her.

Fever Dream goes Antiviral

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

a) The Fever Dream. Brandon Cronenberg started to write the script for Anti Viral back in 2004 during the time he was in film school. He came down with a bout of flu which led to a fever and fever dreams. He began obsessing over sickness, the physical side of it, the fact that he had something infecting the cells in his body that came from the cells of another person's body, and how that was really a hugely intimate thing if you look at it that way.

b) Development from the Dream. Afterwards he started thinking about a character who might be able to see disease in the same way, as something desirable, he would a celebrity obsessed fan who might for instance want Angelina Jolie’s cold as a way of feeling physically connected to her. It then developed into an interesting metaphor and a plot formed the basis of a platform to discuss celebrity obsession and the celebrity culture. The ideas formed his first year project at film school and in his fourth year a scene from that script found its way into his short film Broken Tulip.

 

Source quotes

1. Brandon Cronenberg: I started writing the script in 2004 and I was incredibly sick, and had a bad fever, and I was kind of delirious in bed, and obsessing over sickness and the physical side of sickness, the fact I had something in my body, in my cells that had come from another person's cells and afterwards I started trying to think about a character who might be able to see disease in that way and I thought of a celebrity obsessed fan, and it kind of developed into an interesting metaphor and a sort of a plot formed to discuss celebrity obsession and the celebrity culture (Hollywood Reporter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96nIdliPeGo)
2. Brandon Cronenberg: I was extremely sick and I had this semi-conscious fever dream and when I kind of sobered up afterwards I thought that people might actually enjoy that connection if they looked at it the right way (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xqlC0nM4Xt0#at=128) 
3. NYTimes: How did you get the idea for “Antiviral”?
   Brandon Cronenberg: It started off with me being pretty sick at film school in 2004. I had the flu and was wrestling with this semiconscious fever dream. I started getting obsessed with the fact that I had something physically in my body that had come from someone else’s body. Afterward I was trying to think of a character who would see disease as something intimate. And so I thought of a celebrity-obsessed fan who might want Angelina Jolie’s cold as a way of feeling physically connected to them. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/movies/brandon-cronenberg-on-his-film-antiviral.html?_r=0)
4. OOO: What was your inspiration for this film?
   Brandon Cronenberg: I was extremely sick when I started writing it in in 2004, and I had this really bad flu and started having this semi-conscious fever dream where I was obsessing over the physicality of my illness and the fact that I had something in my body and in my cells that had come from someone else’s body, and how that was really a hugely intimate thing if you look at it that way. (http://www.outofordermag.com/2012/11/antiviral-interview-with-brandon-cronenberg/)
5. THE GENESIS OF ANTIVIRAL
   During his first year as a film student at Ryerson University, the 24 - year - old Brandon Cronenberg developed a serious case of the flu. The illness proved to be the perfect Petridish for the incubation of Antiviral.“During a feverish dream, I became obsessed with the physicality of illness, by the fact that what was infecting my body and my cells
   had come from someone else,” the director recalls. “It’s a weirdly intimate connection. I began to understand how someone, like an ardent fan, might see this kind of connection to the object of their fascination as desirable. The intimacy of that link seemed like a good platform to explore celebrity obsession. These ideas were the basis for a script that was my first year school project. In my fourth year, a scene from that script became my short Broken Tulips.” (http://0101.nccdn.net/1_5/23d/004/318/ANTIVIRAL---PRESS-KIT.pdf)

The crystal at the heart of Shivers

leading from

Dreams That Become Films
and also
David Cronenberg  and Alien
(At the Alien Explorations Blog)

a) The Dream
David Cronenberg's film "Shivers" started with a dream in which two people were lying together in bed at night and the man wakes up, looks over to the woman and sees her mouth open and out of the mouth comes a spider and walks out of her mouth, goes around the house and goes back into her mouth, into her body.. It wasn't a horrific dream, it was just "Oh yeah. the spider that lives in her mouth" and it just lived there. During the day the woman herself would know nothing about it.

b) Reflection
He thought to himself in reflection, "My God, that image is really giving a physical presence to the idea that things go on within us which are strange and disturbing."Also, it seemed the spider in some way gave her life when she was awake.

c) Further development
Embodying that in an insect or creature was really the unique thing about the dream, but he couldn't actually do a spider because it's really hard to make a creature like that with legs that worked, so it became a slug like parasite. And that image was really the crystal around which the rest of the film Shivers formed.

Source quotes

1. David Cronenberg: Shivers did start with a dream I had about a spider that emerged from a woman's mouth at night while she slept. The dream was very casual. It wasn't a horrific dream at all. It was just , "Oh yeah, the spider that lives in her mouth." It seemed the creature just lived there, inside her. It would come out at night, go around the house and go back into her mouth. Back into her body. During the day she knew nothing about it. Afterwards, on reflection, I thought, "My God, that image is really giving a physical presence to the idea that things go on within us which are strange and disturbing. " Also, it seemed the spider in some way gave her life when she was awake. Embodying that in an insect or creature was really the unique thing about the dream. That was really the crystal at the centre of what became Shivers.  (Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Chris Rodley, original hard back edition p43, 1992) 
2. David Cronenberg: It was basically an image that I had, and I can't remember whether I dreamed it or read it somewhere but it was two people lying in a bed at night and the man wakes up, looks over to the woman and sees her mouth open and out of that mouth comes a spider and walks out of her mouth, and that image was really the crystal around which the rest of the film Shivers formed. I couldn't actually do a spider because it's really hard to make those legs move especially on a low budget, so it became a parasite. (Film Four interview, 2001  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUdyX71jFYA)

Beyond The Candelabra

1. I went to see the "Beyond The Candelabra" film which is a Liberace biopic starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and it was because it was a Soderbergh movie that I took the plunge to go and see it. 
2. I probably enjoyed seeing Liberace on TV 35 plus years plus ago. 
3. So the film seemed very good indeed and a great performance by Michael Douglas. Liberace was almost quite a nice person in this film considering the bizarre life style he seemed to have led. There isn't really much that he can say about the movie thought other than it was quite an eye opener, interesting and bizarre, guided in a noticeable cunning Soderbergh perspective where he manages to take things to some extreme while remaining tasteful enough. 
4. The subject matter wasn't really my sort of thing, but I couldn't miss Michael Douglas film performance that would surely go down in cinema history . It was a time for me to explore my own open mindedness about subject matter in film. Indeed the film involved men in a gay relationship having intimate scenes. Since Michael Douglas and Matt Damon were able to deal with it and Steven Soderbergh was there directing it, I decided that there was no way I couldn't sit down and accept it as a normality.
5. I wondered if I was going to see something similar to the movie Interview With A Vampire and in some ways there was something going on there that reminded me of what was going on in that film, there were some strange characters wondering around in the film and there was an appearance by Scott Bakula and I didn't realise it was him until the credits at the end named the character that he played, but it appeared to be about some people's real lives and I couldn't allow my mind to play with the whole story looking for bastardised impressions because it appeared to be seriously about people's lives and whatever ended their relationship was a serious enough matter and there was the fact that these people did really care for one another.  Liberace will be accepted as the person he was and be forever loved by the public, or at least, the version of him played by Michael Douglas.
6. At the end, Liberace is revealed to be a gravity defying cloaked being and after all it was him who had Matt Damon's character transformed into a Patrick Swayze lookalike there in an attempt to make him look more like Liberace and the transformation process  he had to undergo to merge in with Liberace's obsessional landscape got him addicted to drugs given to him for weight loss purposes, Soderbergh enjoyed giving up closeups of the labels, an echo from the movie Side Effects. There are some things that I am not supposed to understand. 
7. As Liberace phones Matt Damon's character up from his death bed, I was reminded of the voice of one of the talking hallucinations such as the Talking Asshole Bug or even the Mugwump from Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch but still they were almost benevolent despite those who got too involved too closely getting lost in further uncertainties.

Pacific something or other...

 

1. I have put all memory of the second half of the title out of my mind, it may well be presented in the poster here but that is as far as it goes.
2. I tend to think of the title as really being "Specific Spam".
3. Hugely enjoyable film with giant robots and monsters fighting in 3D. Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi will stand out in memories but who the main male hero was will soon be forgotten, don't ask me the actor's name, let alone the character he plays. 
4. The scientists were irritating characters and finally the monsters became too many indistinguishable from one another in the last 15 mins, but exactly who is trying tell them apart? 
5. Idris Elba's character helps to save the Earth from alien invasions roughly in the same way as he did in Prometheus indeed. Obviously that's type casting for you. 
6. The white men who were piloting the robots all seemed to look the same to me, it took me a while to work out who was supposed to be who, there was a scene where one of the Australian men gets into a fight with the main male character in the movie because the man wouldn't apologise to the Japanese woman and I couldn't remember after a while whether it was the Australian father or son who looked almost the same age anyway and then I deduced that it must have been the son but I began to realise what the son looked like towards the end of the film but could not remember exactly if he was the person involved in the fight
7. But this was the cinema experience that I was promised, it lived up to the hype and it didn't really matter how much of the cast were killed off and were then forgotten.  The plot was more like some scenario conjured up by a child playing with robots and monsters but it was Del Toro playing with robots and monsters as if he were a child and with all the enthusiasm that one might have hoped as a child he would have had. The visual humour was appreciated such as the point where they discover of a toy robot in the sand of the beach and the moment when a Newton's cradle is set off.
8. Despite being attracted to the concept, naturally this sort of movie wasn't going to go down well with me right from the beginning, there would be irritations about some of the characters but it went down well enough considering, I didn't really appreciate the Hellboy film to want to go and see the sequel, maybe I ought to take a look at it one day. 
9. I look forwards to buying it on blu-ray.
10. I would like a poster of Rinko Kikuchi in her robot piloting outfit and will imagine her sitting on my knee.
    
    
    
    

Dream that leads to the silver orbs in Phantasm

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Don Coscarelli had a dream as a teenager and what he could remember of it, there was also a quite futuristic chrome sphere dispenser out of wihich the orbs would emerge and begin their chase.  He was fleeing down endlessly long marble corridors, pursued by one of these chrome spheres intent on penetrating his skull with a wicked needle,  and as far as he could remember, the spheres never caught up with him. And so the dream stuck with him and later when he came to write Phantasm, it seemed like a perfect device which which to arm the tall man.

Sources

1. The idea of the sphere, or the orb as it's often called , came to Coscarelli in a dream. He had a nightmare with the silver ball chasing him through corridor after corrdor endlessly. "Unlike most dreams, this one stuck with me. And while writing Phantasm, it seemed like a perfect device with which to arm the Tall man." (Reel Terror, p284)
2. THE SILVER SPHERE
   In Don Coscarelli’s surreal 1979 horror flick, something odd is going on in the local mausoleum. Little Mike investigates, but gets caught. Then a silver sphere glides into view. It extrudes knives, flies right into the guy who’s apprehended Mike, and drills into his forehead, sending an arc of blood spurting into the air. The idea came to the director in a dream: “I was in my teens, and what I can remember had mainly to do with my fleeing down endlessly long marble corridors, pursued by a chrome sphere intent on penetrating my skull with a wicked needle. There was a quite futuristic ‘sphere dispenser’ out of which the orbs would emerge and begin chase. As far as I can remember, the spheres never caught up with me…” (www.sfx.co.uk/2009/10/20/50_scariest_horror_moments_ever_40_31/) 
   
   
   

dream of the devil in Post Tenebras Lux

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

1. The Guardian: And the CGI devil?
   Carlos Reygadas: Think for a second. The film is about life, everything you can go through, different representations of evil that we've met, very often incarnated in the devil. Maybe it's also a dream the child has, I don't know. The same thing happens to us in life: when you grow up and think back to your childhood, you can never really know the things you remember are things you created or real. That's the way perception works in the head, isn't it?(www.guardian.co.uk/)
2. Cineaste: About that demon. When that came on the screen, you could hear a wave of astonishment come over the Cannes audience with whom I saw it. This is a new kind of image you've made, an aspect of the Cinema of the Impossible. Where did that come from? Some might view it as fantastical, while your films have been generally grounded in reality, even with the occasion explorations of the metaphysical.
   Carlos Reygadas:Actually I wouldn't say that this is fantasical. Fantasy movies are one of the few genres I don't like. When I was designing this devil, and talking with technicians, they kept going back to notions from Lord of the Rings (2001) and such. I explained to them that this image came out of a dream I had, set in my parents' house, where I lived until I was five. The toolbox the demon is carrying is actually my father's, the one he was carrying before I was born and he still has. (Cineaste Summer 2013, p11)
3. Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   Carlos Reygadas: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life.  (www.slantmagazine.com)
4. Carlos Reygadas: They’re always talking about the bloody devil! I wanted to film a dream. I don’t see devils in ordinary life, so I had to make one in a computer. For me, it’s ordinary reality. Reality is not only the conscious present. But also dreams, memories, the imagined future, actual present, immediate past and immediate future. These things are always there in our mind, flipping back and forth really quickly and without any kind of code. This is just a dream. But dreams are just reality. But whatever. (http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk)
   Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   CR: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life. I put into the film the photo of a Spanish golfer as well. It represents an end of a certain epoch. It's amazingly detailed, yet you don't see any labels on the clothes and props. Personally speaking, it shows my nostalgia for the better times when you weren't forced to name things. The vision of that sort of pureness makes me calm. I don't like and don't need any sort of brands.
   - See more at: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/interview-carlos-reygadas/316#sthash.trfw9Syl.dpuf
   Slant: And you made a red, animated devil who enters the family house twice with a toolbox in his hand. We will never know what's hidden inside. I saw that kind of box in Belle de Jour as well and I still think about it.
   CR: The thing is I also have the right to ask some questions, so I would like to ask you why the hell you would like to know what's inside? [laughs] Evil is part of our lives. The film is about an ordinary life, the imagined future, fantasy, memory. All elements of pure naturalism! The red devil could be part of dreams, so it's as real as they are and as important as any other part of everyday life. I put into the film the photo of a Spanish golfer as well. It represents an end of a certain epoch. It's amazingly detailed, yet you don't see any labels on the clothes and props. Personally speaking, it shows my nostalgia for the better times when you weren't forced to name things. The vision of that sort of pureness makes me calm. I don't like and don't need any sort of brands.
   - See more at: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/interview-carlos-reygadas/316#sthash.trfw9Syl.dpuf

Hummingbird

1. Indeed we may well be dealing with a multitude of utterances of "Hmm" wondering what to make of the experience. Actually this was a good and fair Jason Statham movie giving in some scenes where he wasn't breaking people's bones, a fairly sensitive performance and his relationship with the main female character was quite a different too for mainstream cinema so despite the endless violence there was something quirkily sensitive going on. Many recogniseable shots of places to be found in Covent Garden and Soho were to be seen but don't expect to find a woman yelling out "cut price t-shirts" in the place where she was seen in the movie
2. I heard that he played quite an emotional role in the film "London" starring Jessica Beal from several years ago, I still haven't seen it, I might be concerned about seeing it myself if he doesn't get a chance to beat the living daylights out of someone in it but I suppose anything too extreme like allowing Statham to act could send his typical audience into a state of confusion and mental paralysis. 
3. The hummingbird in the title appear to be hallucinations of hummingbirds from a traumatic wartime event in a country where hummingbirds don't naturally exist but in cinema it just seems to be the normal thing to have people hallucinating hummingbirds, as in Cowboys vs Aliens and something else that I can't remember.
4. I suppose in the end. the role the leading lady had was a sort role that could have been in a British movie fifty years ago where the romance on the screen was a much more innocent thing, and so well it would not have been ideal for the Angelina Jolie and Jessica Biel wannabees of this world. Former Polish model Agata Buzek as an actress had a slightly unconventional look but one much appreciated and I look forwards to more appearances fro her in time to come. Yes, I think that what one could extract from that film was quite wonderful at the end of the day and if it went down as a commercial flop that's not ultimately a bad thing,  it defied aspects of mainstream conventions while still coming up with something solid so that Jason Statham could do his thing while keeping the ship going for those who want to see Jason Statham doing something that they expect him to do which probably can have the effect of forcing him into a tight corner, hopefully though they made enough money to make other smaller budget movies like this seem reasonable. 

World War Zzzzzzzzz......

a) Seeing the movie. I found himself going to see the zombie movie World War Z which I went to see not having much hope for it and although I liked the main characters in the movie, I appreciated the use of 3D in most of the movie, but by the end of the film I found that I wanted to call it World War Zzzzzzzzz...... and so it seems that a number of other reviewers have addressed it by a similar amount of Zs. It just got more hideously boring for me as I watched the various seemingly idiotic events that took place to help string together its attempt at plotting. There is the fact that the script had been rewritten by Damon Lindelof and maybe I should have pretended that I didn't read or hear that name. He seems to be someone playing script doctor these days because he is a well known script writer whose name seems to help film productions along but his name never seems to be good news for me , so I wonders what the original script was like and if the people acted as idiots in the same way to get the film moving. However one thing to note though that I don't have much of an interest in zombie movies so that might probably take a lot of the fun out of seeing this film.

b) Reasons why I didn't like it, involving spoilers: What seemed the most idiotic was the way that they went to Korea to take a look at a situation only because they hadn't read the e-mail properly, the only reason to get the story going was to have idiotic mistakes  taking place, such as when Brad Pitt's character was returning to the plane in Korea, he didn't turn his mobile phone off for the purpose of silence just in case he was called, and when they got to Israel, it was only when he was there that the people were singing loudly enough to draw the zombies in, the columns of zombies were great scenes but indeed the reason why they suddenly crawled over the walls at that moment irritated me endlessly, sure there would have been enough of this singing taking place earlier or was it really only at that moment when Brad was there that they

Brad Pitt as the film's leading character

decided to let the people in through the walls. If they showed less of the closeups of zombies I might have enjoyed the film even more.and in the aircraft, the idea that someone had spent the whole time in the toilet since the beginning of the flight having turned into a zombie at some point without causing concern about spending so long in a toilet. Then there was the moment where Brad Pitt survived the aeroplane crash in a totally destroyed aeroplane, it looked ridiculous. Probably what was discovered about avoiding being killed by the zombies irritated me as wel, and the moment when the woman in the clinic telephones Brad Pitt when he is about to enter the chamber where the viruses are kept really seemed idiotic since that was another thing about to attract the zombies.

Daniella Kertesz as Segen

c) Things that I liked.  I loved the beginning scenes of traffic in the high street with explosions in the distance and people running in terror, the scene in the super market where people were trying to get their provisions, and the scenes of destruction involving trucks/lorries smashing other vehicles in their way. I thought that Brad Pitt carried the film well, I don't think that he has been in too many movies recently, the cast otherwise seemed generally unknown. The actors who played his wife and children were all fine in the film, they didn't irritate me in the slightest, and Brad Pitt managed to get to play the sensitive father. The sight of a noticeably British street in Wales was briefly a merry site, and the odd slightly disorienting scene where Brad Pitt wakes up after three days, one wondered what was about to happen next but once the rest of that scenario was spelt out, it didn't inspire me too much.  The female Israeli soldier, Segen, played by Daniella Kertesz with her soulful look seemed very lovely even with very short hair and keeping her alive through the film even with only one hand left was a great asset enough to keep me slipping into a comatose state because of the complete boredom before the end of the movie but by the end of the movie everything in the film was boring.

During the film I began to wonder what would happen if this film started to fuse with the recent movie Zero Dark Thirty that had a lot of scenes in compounds in hot countries and a military presence with men encaged. I wondered if there was a way to have David Morse suddenly become an encaged member of Al Qaida although I couldn't imagine what he could possibly do.  

d) The final part. The final part of the movie dealt with getting into a wing of a hospital taken over by zombies and this is where I became incredibly bored and wanted to go to sleep. Maybe this is the sort of thing that might inspire computer game players, I do not know.

The Dream that became The Ladykillers

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Alex Guinness, Danny Green and
Katie Johnson in The Ladykillers

1. One night he dreamt up the idea for The Ladykillers, as Mackendrick once recalled: "Bill woke up one night with the idea complete in his head. He had dreamed of a gang of criminals who commit a successful robbery while living in a little house belonging to a sweetly innocent little old lady."  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk) 
2. Liam Rudden : Earlier this year I met Kindred Rose, son of William Rose, who revealed that The Ladykillers was very nearly a story that was never told.
   He explained, “My dad’s first wife, Tania, told me that one night, in the summer of 1954, he had woken her up and told her of this strange dream he’d had about five criminals who knew that, to get away with their last robbery, they had to kill this lovely old lady. However, the more they tried, the more difficult it became, until only she was left.
   
   "He told Tania all this in the middle of the night and then promptly went back to sleep. The next morning at breakfast she asked if he remembered his dream and he had no recollection of it whatsoever.
   
   "She then told him his dream... so he first heard his story of The Ladykillers from her."
   
   That story was quickly embraced by the studio with The Ladykillers released very soon after.
   
   Rose adds, “With almost all his other films, my father would talk about them for years before they would be developed. This was the fastest turn around of them all - just a matter of months from having the dream to it being in the cinema. Ealing fast-tracked it because everyone loved it but even so, that’s quite impressive."
   
   The Ladykillers is also the only one of Rose’s films in which everyone dies.
   
   “From day one he insisted that the characters shouldn’t be too real. They had to be caricatures because if the audience empathises too much, then having them all die at the end would be too dark and wouldn’t be funny. So they are meant to be cartoon-like, the opposite of the characters in his other films.” (www.scotsman.com 01/11/2012 13:51 )

Dreams inspired the tidle wave sequence in Abyss: Special Edition

leading from

Dreams That Become Films

Omni: The release version of The Abyss was two hours and 20 minutes; the Special Edition was three hours. About half of what you put back is character development
-- bits and pieces, the relationship between the two main characters. Another 20 minutes is the subplot leading up to nuclear confrontation and the NTIs' (non-terrestrial  intelligence) resolution of that with the wave. Was the wave sequence -- which was cut from the theatrical version of the movie, but available on Special Edition on laser disc or cassette -- really inspired by a dream you had?

James Cameron: I used to always dream about tidal waves. I don't know if it's a Jungian thing; I haven't researched it. Waves are rather good metaphors, which is probably why I was attracted to [rewriting the Kathryn Bigelow feature] Point Break, even though I don't surf. It was called Johnny Utah originally; there were nine drafts of the script floating around. The idea of surfing and the psychology of that was very interesting to me.

Waves are fascinating, especially if you've studied physics. Once the energy has been expended to displace the wave, the wave can't be stopped. If you've ever spent any time in big waves, you know that the human body is nothing compared to a mass of water being moved around. Waves struck me as a good metaphor for death. (Omni magazine 1998)

Dreams that inspired Kill List

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Dreams That Become Films

When Ben Wheatley sat down to write the script for Kill List with his wife Amy, they took things such as reoccurring nightmares, fears and anxieties of theirs and writing them into the fabric of the script. When he was a child he lived near the woods and was afraid of the woods., and he would have a dream where he was hearing music, and following a large group of people who were going to do some kind of worship that he didn't understand and then he watched them turning seeing him, chasing him and killing him. It was a key image for Ben and disturbed him since he was very small and later found that at screenings of his film,  others were saying that had similar dreams and so for Ben it made some sense.

SOURCES

1. Q. Is it true that Kill List was inspired by your childhood nightmares? 
   Ben Wheatley: Yes, I trawled my memories for the scariest things I could think of and that whole thing of following cultists through the woods stems from a dream I used to have a lot as a kid. I just thought if it was scary as a kid then it could apply to lots of people, and weirdly, afterwards when we’d had a few screenings people were saying that they had had similar dreams, so it kind of made sense.(www.indielondon.co.uk)
2. Ben Wheatley: And I'd been thinking about things that really scared me, things from dreams and nightmares I'd had as a kid, so I kind of thought about those and wrote those down. And then general fears of like I've got a young son as well, and that kind of thing with being a father is that you worry about the fear of me accidentally crashing a car or something and killing your family and it being your fault. So there was that kind of fear, and then the whole thing with the cults is I used to dream a lot about following cults in the wood and them seeing me, chasing me and killing me, so it was kind a mixture of those two. And then it was just mixing together and finding a throughline that would be able to kind of just tie those terrifying moments together - and that's where the list came from. (www.boxoffice.com)
3. Kill list is not like any other horror film I’ve ever seen, did you aim to make it as original as possible when you were making it?
   Ben Wheatley: Yeah, I think you always want to make something original…well I suppose not, you might be making a remake. Going in to it I thought that if I was going to make a horror film then it better be horrible and there’s no point doing it unless it’s going to be scary. A lot of the stuff came from dreams and nightmares that I had as a kid so when I wrote it with Amy (his wife) we kind of strung together those incidents so I felt that if it was primal enough to give me enough of a fear that would give me a reoccurring nightmare then it might chime with an audience. (idolmag.co.uk)
   
4. Ben Wheatley: Much of it was strung together from nightmares I had as a kid, recurring dreams of being chased. (www.timeout.com)

   

   Ben Wheatley (image  from web.orange.co.uk/)

5. Which leads into the Pagan cult aspect of the film. Is that degree of fanatical, religion-based group mentality something that has always fascinated, or even frightened, you?
   
   Ben Wheatley:Yeah, that comes from dreams, for me. I used to have nightmares about that when I was little. I lived near the woods, and I was afraid of the woods. When Amy [Jump, his wife] sat down to write the script, we tried taking these things that are recurring nightmares, fears, and anxieties of ours and writing them into the fabric of the script, to make sure that we’d hit these beats and make people feel uncomfortable.
   For me, I guess, the script really started from this dream I used to have, which was being in the woods, hearing music, and following an awful lot of people who were going off to do some kind of worship that I didn’t understand, and then me watching them and them turning, seeing me, and chasing me. That was the key image for me, that disturbed me since I was very small. (www.complex.com/) 
6. The sound design also gives the film a very heavy, haunting dreamlike feel, which seems to fall in line with your nightmare influences.
   
   Ben Wheatley: I think cinema is a dream, though, isn’t it? That’s the thing. You go into a dark space, you have a vision, and then you leave it—that’s a dream. All films are compressed time. They don’t make any sense; they jump around in time and space, and you’re looking up close at things and looking far away at things. If you think about what your reality is, your reality is a fixed camera that moves through space. The only other time where you have something that jumps through space and time and you move very close from things and very far away from things, very quickly, is dreams. (www.complex.com/)