Savage Popcorn

Born February 8, 1932, John Williams is an American composer, conductor and pianist. In a career that spans six decades, Williams has composed many of the most famous film scores in history, including all but one of Steven Spielberg’s feature films, Star Wars, Superman, Jaws, E.T., Born on the Fourth of July, Harry Potter, and more. In short, if you’ve watched any films at all over the past thirty years, then you will have heard a John Williams score. Even if you haven’t seen the films, the music is so iconic that you will probably recognise it anyway.

Now go and check out this tribute from Moosebutter.

With only days left until the Presidential election, street artist Shepard Fairey and director Melissa Balin have teamed up to try and create their own grass-roots movement in support og the Obama campaign by launching the Vote for Change Video Postcards. Truth be told, though, it’s less a grass-roots movement and more a series of sixty second celebrity endorsements, but some of them are pretty good and worth watching.

So here’s John C. Reilly on being white…

… and there are many more on the Vote for Change website.

Waiting for a science fiction film from Ridley Scott is a bit like waiting for a bus. Nothing for 25 years and then two turn up at once.

As I’ve already mentioned, Scott is planning to bring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to the big screen. It now seems that Brave New World will be the film he makes after he’s brought Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to cinemas.

“I first pursued ‘Forever War’ 25 years ago, and the book has only grown more timely and relevant since,” Scott told Daily Variety. “It’s a science-fiction epic, a bit of ‘The Odyssey’ by way of ‘Blade Runner,’ built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise.”

The Forever War tells the story of William Mandella, who returns from from weeks or months of active duty in the interstellar “Forever War” to an Earth which, after centuries of change, is no longer his home.

Sometimes it feels that an unoriginal film – either a remake or an adaptation of a book or, worse, a computer game – is being announced every other week. But every now and then an adaptation appears in the pipeline that looks like it might be worth keeping an eye out for. Here’s an example:

Ridley Scott is planning to direct Brave New World.

All is not rosy, however as revealed in an interview with io9, and they are still struggling with the script:

[W]e’re still struggling with that one. I have 40 things on the go at once. But that’s a very important one. And sometimes, some surface faster than the others. It’s partly luck of the draw. Even with a good writer, he’ll do it and screw up. So then you go back to the table and start all over again, it’s hard. The hardest single thing is getting it on paper.

That said though, it’s positive that they are bothering with a script – and not going straight to the storyboard as seems far too common with many of the summer blockbusters – and I will be very interested in seeing what Scott does with Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic.

Satirical genius, Chris Morris has been developing a comedy about Islamic terrorists, centring on a group of would-be suicide bombers from the North of England. Morris has said of the project that he wanted to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis by showing them as ‘scary but also ridiculous’. And not a moment too soon.

However, both the BBC and Channel 4 have rejected the comedy as being too controversial for TV.

The good news, however, is that Film4 is putting up the money to develop the project as a film.

A Channel 4 spokeswoman told trade magazine Broadcast: ‘Channel 4 has a long history of working with Chris Morris, and a significant funding contribution towards his latest project is being made.

‘It was agreed at a very early stage that the project would work best as a film and from this point was developed through Film4.’

There is no title, script or release date as yet. But if this does go all the way into production then we can all look forward to Morris’ big screen début.

A migrant, living in the UK, has this to say about the latest stunt dreamt up by the a government desperate to find a justification for their ID card plans:

[Y]our Labour Party has taken my biometrics and will force me to carry the papers my grandparents destroyed when they fled the Soviet Union. In living memory, my family has been chased from its home by governments whose policies and justification the Labour Party has aped. Your Labour Party has made me afraid in Britain, and has made me seriously reconsider my settlement here. I am the father of a British citizen and the husband of a British citizen. I pay my tax. I am a natural-born citizen of the Commonwealth. The Labour Party ought not to treat me — nor any other migrant — in a way that violates our fundamental liberties. The Labour Party is unmaking Britain, turning it into the surveillance society that Britain’s foremost prophet of doom, George Orwell, warned against. Labour admits that we migrants are only the first step, and that every indignity that they visit upon us will be visited upon you, too. If you want to live and thrive in a free country, you must defend us too: we must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.

The migrant in question is Cory Doctorow, a Canadian author who is supporting himself but is no threat to anyone.

Much has been said about what is wrong with the government’s ID card scheme – it’s overly complex, unnecessarily intrusive, not properly costed and horrendously expensive. And for what? Why are the government so keen to introduce these things?

It’s a serious question, and one for which I have so far seen no answer: What does the Labour Party expect to achieve by introducing ID cards?

Dealing with fan mail is a problem faced by many authors – especially as their popularity grows. CT2 reveals that Robert Heinlein had an entertainingly unique solution to this – the form letter.

While a form letter such as this may be a bit impersonal, some acknowledgement is better than none and it is impressive that Heinlein managed to reply to pretty much all his mail. There is probably also something revealing about fandom in the fact that a mere 21 responses were enough to cover the vast bulk of Heinlein’s mail.

Sadly this approach was abandoned in 1984 when, according to Heinlein’s wife, Ginny: “with the advent of computerization in our household, we no long use the form letter to answer fan mail. I find that it is possible now, with the computer, to write individual letters in reply to fan mail faster than I could check off the answer on the form.”

Terry Gilliam is still one of the most innovative and original directors working today and I am looking forward to seeing what he does with this upcoming The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. So I’m more than a little grateful to Quiet Earth for digging up this featurette which introduces the story with a combination of photos and concept art.

It does look like a very strong return to form for Gilliam and I’m even more keen to see this film than I already was.

The Observer has quite a good article today charting the rise of Daily Show presenter Jon Stewart and asking what his success tells you about the dire state of journalism in the US.

His most effective move is to cull through the tapes of all the countless banalities, hypocritical contradictions and attempted snow-jobs executed in boundless profusion on our airwaves and on political podiums. He just puts them on the air and you watch with slack-jawed amazement.

And here’s an example (via) of him puncturing the sort of nice-sounding but utterly meaningless phrase so beloved by political types.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Looking back to the UK and the inanities being uttered by members of the two major parties (and I have to admit that I have found myself becoming increasingly unimpressed with the Lib Dems over the past few months), where is Chris Morris. Still, there’s always In The Loop to look forward to next year.