HMV shaped hole

While pondering what to write today’s blog post on I was plagued with the reports of HMV going into administration.  Beautiful, beloved HMV.

I thought I could write about my first HMV purchase…but I honestly can’t remember what that was.

HMV, however, has been a staple part of my life for a long, long, long time.  I would leap up the steps in the Canterbury branch when I was a student to gaze longingly at the DVDs, pondering which ones to spend my student loan on.  I have bought countless Christmas presents, CDs and DVDs from HMV over the years and even though my activity has scaled back lately, I will sorely miss it.

That’s the problem though, isn’t it.  My HMV buying activity has dropped significantly.  Since losing my student loan (apparently it’s called graduation), I have put a strict limit on myself.  I only buy them when they are cheap.  I will try my hardest to wait until they are £3 although sometimes I will give in and go for the 2 for £10.  All from HMV.

Amazon just doesn’t do these prices justice.  Ok, sometimes Amazon and Play.com will do good DVD deals but nothing beats walking into HMV and seeing that film you’ve waited ages for, sitting there all pretty and shiny with a £3 price label, available to take home and treasure today.  Right now.  The regularity of this happening in HMV is amazing – very rarely do you find these deals online.  Even when you do find films this cheap online, the magic is lost through clicking the mouse buttons and then waiting…and waiting.

In November I spoiled myself.  I allowed myself to go on a DVD frenzy.  I bought about six DVDs all in one go.  I know!  Shocking!  I hadn’t done something like that since my university days and I’ll tell you something, it felt good!
That will probably be the last time I ever do that…

Saying that, HMV did do some stinkers.  Chocolate?  Drinks?  A limited amount of rubbish books?  They all scream desperation.  The one that really got to me was the loyalty card.  Sign up and reap the rewards!  So I did, hoping that with all of my expenditure I would get the odd free film to add to my collection.  Nope.  The only offered ‘VIP’ rewards.  Limited edition things.  Now, ok, maybe when I was fourteen I would have been interested.  Maybe.  Certainly not now.  Now that I’m all grown up and what-not the most important thing is owning that film in the most economically efficient way possible.

I didn’t buy any Christmas presents from HMV this year.  Although I refuse to take the blame for them going into administration!  I walked in many a time but the queue was always so horrendous that I decided to do any DVD and CD shopping from the comfort of my sofa.  But the queues were horrendous – people were shopping there!  What happened HMV?

The truth is that no where does it quite like HMV.  The staff are friendly and helpful (and sometimes very attractive), the shelves brimming with bargains and it’s a wonderful place to just mooch sometimes.  To discover the latest offering, to jump up and down at your latest cinema gem finally being made readily available in disc form.  To get that impulse purchase or treat after dragging yourself around shops with your other half.

Download are taking over.  The world is turning digital.  I love my film but I don’t download them, I’m not part of Netflix or…that other one (name escapes me)…and I don’t want to be.  I am very content in my movie watching habits, thank you very much.  Vue, Sky Movies and HMV keep me up to date and afloat.  They keep my DVD collection shiny and ever expanding.

It’s a sad time and, for now at least, I’m not sure who will fill the big HMV shaped hole in my life if it leaves the high street…

The pen is mightier than the camera

The book is always better than the film.

I can’t remember how old I was when I realised this but I’ve always found it to be true.

Two examples that immediately come to mind are, for some reason, both Stephen King stories;

'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption'  and 'The Body'

 

 The Shawshank Redemption is pretty close to the book but for some reason I found myself favouring the book over the film.

The Body is my favourite story, read when I was 18.  The film adaptation, Stand By Me, came into my life when I was 12.  There are some notable differences, the main one being the focus point of the story.  Stand By Me focuses on Gordie Lachance, the narrator, whereas The Body has Gordie focusing on his best friend, Chris Chambers.

This being said, the most prolific scene for me in Stand By Me is actually different in The Body; as a 12 year old girl I fell in love with Chris Chambers the moment he rescued Teddy from the train tracks.  I was, therefore, a little shocked to find that it is Gordie who rescues Teddy in the book.

Both of these stories are beautifully written and wonderfully told.  So what happens when a film is made based on a poorly written book? 

I first started to think about this when I discovered that John Dies At The End is being made into a film. The trailer actually doesn’t look too bad but I found the book to be great at the beginning only to completely lose me somewhere in the middle and eventually just plain annoy me by the end.  I had to force myself to finish it and was actualy angry with the conclusion.  I’m curious to see if the film will be any good, but doubt I'll waste money on seeing it on the big screen.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter 

 

 Last year I went to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter at the cinema.  It was the first time in a very long time that I have considered walking out in the middle of a film.  Read my review here!

For my birthday, my darling beloved bought me the book (by Seth Grahame-Smith).  Thanks, love.

Well, I thought I should give it a go.  I was intrigued.  Following my own rule that the book is always better than the film I thought it had to have something going for it.

It did.  It was a real page turner and I zoomed through it.  The first thing I noticed was it is completely different from the film!

I don’t just mean a little different.  It’s not like The Fellowship of the Ring when Tom Bombadil got left out.  It’s not like Stand By Me where Gordie saves Teddy instead of Chris.  It is completely, totally different.

Ok, perhaps I’m exaggerating.  It is still about Abraham Lincoln who is a vampire hunter and becomes President of the United States.  He still loses his mother at the beginning to a vampire, he still loses a child to a vampire and both Henry Sturges, his vampire mentor, and Joshua Speed are in the book.  There is a civil war and slavery, because you can’t just rewrite history like that.

And that’s it.

That’s where the similarity ends.

What the script writers have done is give the story a greater impact and made Abe Lincoln that little bit more likeable, and politically correct, by giving him a black vampire slaying friend.  I found it quite shocking that, through the entire book, Abe didn’t speak to, let alone befriend, any of the slaves he was fighting for the rights of.  In fact, the book suggests that rather than wishing to help the slaves themselves, he wanted to end slavery in order to fight vampires.  The theory being that vampires are taking over America because the white folk have given them a plentiful supply of food through slave auctions.

This makes for an interesting plot in a novel, but not for a film.  Fair enough.   Actually, even for a novel, it’s a little slow.

So why make a film out of it in the first place?  I’m assuming someone heard the concept and thought it an interesting one for a film.

There can, then, be no excuse for the dodgy scenes in the film.  I thought that the book might explain why Abe Lincoln could fell a whole tree with one blow despite not having Buffy Summers' slayer powers.  The truth is that in the book he is only described as being incredibly strong because he trained so hard.  

The stampede scene in the film that made me stare at the exit sign in the cinema?  Nonexistent in the book.  Someone definately needs to answer for that scene alone.

The endings of the book and film are also very different.  Should I tell you the ending of the book?  It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.  I thoroughly enjoyed the last scene of the film and not just because it meant that the film was over.  Henry sits in a modern, present day bar and essentially finds himself a new vampire hunter to train. 

That’s another thing that the book and film have in common which I enjoyed in both; Henry Sturges.  The story is about Abraham Lincoln, but I’ve never been the type who will cheer for the hero.  I’m the type who will always seek out the sidekick, the secondary character, that person in the background.  They are often the most interesting characters, perhaps because they have gaps that need to be filled in. 

There is more to Henry in the book and because of this, and because the book didn’t make me cringe, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is yet another example of the book being better than the film.

Closing the Looper

**SPOILER ALERT**

It’s been a long time since I went to the cinema.  It was to see Brave, surrounded by enthralled children.  Last night, full of cinema withdrawal, I saw Looper which was a much more adult experience.  The trailers didn’t promise much.   Paranormal Activity 4 which looked scary but from what I’ve seen of the Paranormal Activity franchise, that piece of scariness was probably it.  Sinister, which actually looked quite good if I could cope with films of that nature.  Skyfall, boring, boring, boring and Bullet In The Head which was dripping with testosterone and so macho I nearly choked on my M&Ms.  It made me a little worried about Looper, if I’m honest.

I needn’t have worried.  Looper is fast paced, gripping and a testament to the writers and actors.  I haven’t left a cinema that exhilarated since The Dark Knight.

Time travel doesn’t exist yet but it does thirty years in the future.  Outlawed, it is used only by the big criminals.  Bodies are hard to dispose of in the future, so they take their mark, send them thirty years in the past where as assassin kills them and disposes of the corpse.  These assassins are known as loopers.  When their bosses choose to end the agreement, they send the looper’s older counterpart back to be killed.  The looper does the deed, takes the gold payment and lives out their last thirty years.  This is called closing the loop.

Just the premise alone is enough to get me hot under the collar.  But many a film has an exciting premise and then falls apart.  The worry with Looper is that it involves time travel which is notoriously difficult to pull off.  Time travel can never be infallible; there will always be plot holes and parts that just don’t make sense.  What the writers of Looper have done is cleverly disguise these holes until they are barely noticeable.  It is only when you wake up the next morning that they begin to occur to you and by then it’s too late, you’ve already fallen for the film.

Or maybe this was just me.  I woke up with questions but instantly forgave Looper all of its indiscretions because I enjoyed it so much.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe) was unrecognisable.  He brilliantly mimicked Willis’ trademark looks and gestures and so when Bruce Willis (older Joe) makes an appearance, their performance as one character is flawless.  Bruce Willis gave a performance to remind viewers just what he is capable of, not just an action hero.  Emily Blunt (Sara) also showed her acting prowess and despite being introduced fairly late she is a well rounded individual that the viewers can immediately like and empathise with.  On a side note, keep an eye out for Garret Dillahunt (Bert in Raising Hope).

I admit I was concerned at the beginning.  The world in which Joe lives in is gritty, dark and depressing.  It is filled with poverty, drugs and prostitutes and this, naturally, makes me uneasy.  As with all good films that start off with this uneasiness, my fears were unfounded.  These particular topics were not focused upon and yet were dealt with the brutality that they deserve.  Ultimately, however, this is a film about love.  The love a mother has for her son, a love a son has for his mother, a love a man has for his wife.  Actually, the parental relationship is a key theme throughout as children are abandoned for a life of drugs and partying.  Even Joe’s boss, played superbly by Jeff Daniels, is an incarnation of Dickens’ Fagin, a father figure for the desperate, recruiting young boys and putting a gun in their hands.

There were a couple of aspects that truly blew me away with this film.  Firstly the concept of meeting ones future self.  I loved the interaction between Gordon-Levitt and Willis and instantly began to wonder what my future self would make of me now.  These two men are one character and yet they are so different, not only because people grow and change as they age but because of the different paths they have taken despite being one and the same.  This is an original concept that allows the viewer to see how decisions in early life can change everything – where we grow old, the people we love, our opinions and regrets.

This is cleverly portrayed by these characters being similar enough for it to be believable that they are the same person but also differing on enough aspects for the viewer to generate separate opinions on each.

The other aspect which left me wide eyed and in awe was Pierce Gagnon who plays Cid, a ten year old boy.  In this present, some people have developed minor telekinesis skills and Cid’s scenes are what the X-Men franchise could have been.  The special effects, coupled with the soundtrack, make his anger and fear truly spectacular.  His acting is impeccable for one so young and Cid is both sweet and devastating all at once.

Gagnon not only plays Cid seamlessly and beautifully but the writers have created an incredible character in this boy.  One moment you’re terrified, the next you want to hold him and protect him.  Through this boy, the film questions the nature/nurture argument and will rip you apart as you will nurture to win.  The nature/nurture theory could also arguably be applied to Joe, abandoned by his mother as a child and left alone in the world before he became the youngest looper.  It is therefore surprisingly that he is such a well rounded individual but this makes his dreams all the more poignant.

Cid is only one fantastic part that makes Looper a triumph.  This film is gory, disturbing, heart breaking and funny.  It is everything I wanted and needed in a film.

My only piece of advice when watching Looper is not to think too much about the time travel.  Just accept it as it is given. 

Don’t question, just enjoy.