Something 4 The Weekend by
Welcome ladies, gentlemen and film
fans everywhere to entertainment manchester's weekly
feature 'Something for the Weekend'. If, as
Forrest Gump once might have said were he a film fan,
cinema really is like a box of chocolates, then think
of us as your mini-menu, steering you away from the
coffee creams and towards the Turkish delights of the
movie world.
Prepare to arch those eyebrows kids, because irony makes its return to our cinema screens this weekend with the long-awaited (that's not irony, by the way, there are genuinely people who can't wait for this) release of Snakes on a Plane. Or SoaP as the internet has shortened it to.
As the title would suggest, this is a film all about some snakes, who get on to a plane and start causing havoc. No I’m not kidding. That’s the plot. All the plot. Yeah, that’s right, you’re running out to your local multiplex as we speak aren’t you? However, despite this ‘brilliant’ premise and the presence of Samuel L Jackson on the cast list the story of the film's production is more interesting than the film itself is likely to be.
Beginning life at an after-hours meet among Hollywood execs, the film's title and concept were borne out of a game to see who could come up with the worst movie pitch ever. Producer David Berenson, riffing off a similarly snake-themed script called Venom, threw forward the title Snakes on a Plane, people laughed, suggested he follow the idea through and voila, Snakes on a Plane was born.
But the story doesn't end there. When Jackson came on board (apparently simply for the title), the producers decided to play the idea straight and renamed it Pacific Air Flight 121. This angered the internet (and Jackson), who had taken the ridiculous title and premise to their hearts and demanded that it be changed back.
That the studio obliged with this marked a huge change in studio-fan relations. Normally, when, for example, comic book fans make such demands they are greeted with snorts of derision from movie execs, but this time the movie men saw an opening. The title had generated a cult on the web. Fans were creating pre-emptive parodies, posters, trailers, t-shirts and even lines of dialogue, all of course, done ironically.
Simple economics demanded that the studio listen to fans’ cries. After all, why pay for advertising when you have the world wide web publicising your movie for free. And so fans' input, for better or worse, was accepted, with even one of the suggested lines of dialogue - Jackson blaring "I want these motherfucking snakes off this motherfucking plane" - proving so popular that the studio demanded reshoots to not only fit the line in, but also up the gore ante from PG-13 to an R rating.
Now the release date is ‘finally’ upon us, but critics are yet to see it. This is usually the death knell for a film, a desperate move from the studio to disguise the fact a movie is bad by refusing to let critics see it and warn the public of its general rubbishness. But, yet again, the studio has a new, cunning spin, saying that they are not showing the film to critics because they want the fans, who helped publicise it so much, to see it first.
Sounds like a huge cop-out to me, but you can make up your mind from this weekend, along with the even weirder prospect of A Scanner Darkly.
Directed by Richard Linklater and based on the novel of the same name by Sultan of Strange Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly is a unique-looking film which aims to capture Dick's blending of reality and fantasy through rotoscoping. Basically, Linklater shot stars Robert Downey Jnr, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Woody Harrelson in normal, live action and then, together with his crew, effectively drew over them in post-production.
Sounds technical and the film itself, concerning the typically Dick-esque ideas of reality, paranoia, conspiracies and drugs, looks dark and brooding meaning it may not be the most popular Friday-night-at-the-pictures film.
If that is your thought process, you could hop along to see John Tucker Must Die (what is it with odd titles this week?), a high-school comedy starring that gardener fella from Desperate Housewives as the titular Tucker who three-times some no doubt attractive ladies and gets his comeuppance. All's well that ends well, eh?
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