I’ve been very impressed by the trailers I have seen for Iron Man. The reviews are now starting to come in, and everyone seems to love it. And now it has got the thumbs up from my favorite movie reviewer. Believe it or not, it is actually on here in Darkest Somerset, but I hate going to movies on my own, and anyway I’m still shackled to my laptop. Ah well, guess I’ll get it on video.
Movies
On Car Design
Well, Scott Speed might not have made it in Formula 1, but his namesake is about to hit the big screen. Yes, Speed Racer: The Movie is almost upon us, and therefore a whole bunch of people who are not motor racing fans are getting to pontificate on what makes a sexy car.
Speed’s car, the Mach 5, disappointed the folks at the Detroit Motor Show. Quite right too. It looks like something Jack Brabham might have driven at Le Mans.
Speed’s rival’s car, which is apparently Japanese, has caught the eye of the folks at io9. But Charlie dear, that’s not a racing car, that’s a heap of ironmongery on wheels.
The trouble is that these Hollywood guys are a bunch of pikers when it comes to car design. If you want a sexy-looking race car, you go to the guys who design such things for a living. The new cars from McLaren and Ferrari are way cooler than anything the movie has produced.
Oh, and as for the rival car being driven by the lads from Super Best Friends Aguri…
Home at Last
I did my usual trick on the plane – I was asleep before we left the ground. When I woke up two hours later I looked up at the screen and paused to think: just what movie would feature a young man in old-fashioned clothes walking across a green field towards a hole in wall? Yes, it was Stardust, and I had slept through most of it.
Ah well, it looked quite fun. I’m kind of impressed that Michelle Pfeiffer signed up for a gig that involved her being made to look that ugly.
My flight was late in due to a mechanical problem that delayed take-off (much better than having your undercarriage collapse when you land, I think) and Kevin’s was early, so by the time I had got over to Terminal 1 he was on the ground. We stopped off at Chipotle on the way home to pick up dinner and the staff seemed impressed by how well we got on together. The girl guessed that we had been married for 30 years. I suppose it is good to know that we look happy together, but I’m not sure what it says about how old we look.
Feminist Rant Time
Via the Feminist SF Blog I discover that Warner Brothers will no longer be making films with female leads. Apparently they made a couple of turkeys and found it easier to blame the actresses than the (probably male) directors. You can find the full story here.
I would happily promise to boycott Warner movies for a while, but as that would cause me little more inconvenience that promising to stop playing the flute, or watching basketball, I guess it would be an empty gesture.
Meanwhile one of my Finnish pals lays into that well known chauvinist pig, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Back Online
And the office looks tidy for the first time since, well, when we moved in I guess.
Fiona on Hollywood
Fiona Avery has a long post about Tolkien. Much of it is the usual stuff about what it good about the books, but there’s also a few paragraphs about the difficulties of working in Hollywood and how even Peter Jackson might sometimes have to agree to do something really bad to a movie if an important enough “executive” has a stupid enough whim.
Temeraire on Film
I had this sneaking suspicion, when I read the first three chapters of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire, that here was a series that was going to be massively commercial. I had no idea. Now comes the news that Peter Jackson, no less, has bought a movie option on the books. Well, you know what they say about movie options, but Jackson does seem to have taken a personal interest in the project. The Guardian has more details.
I note that the Guardian article describes Temeraire as a “monster”. Good job there’s no name on the article, or someone was likely to get eaten.