Idle Fanedit Ideas: Interstellar

I watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar last night.

It was an astonishingly pretty film with some great use of music - I really appreciated the use of the organ to give it a distinctive sound without resorting to classical music as so many space-faring films tend to do.

Unfortunately, the characters weren't great and despite the film being 150-odd minutes long, didn't get fleshed out enough. The dialogue was a lot clunkier than I've come to expect in a Nolan film, and it felt over-long.

So I've been thinking about how I might tackle this as an edit. The first thing would be to shorten it - I suspect this would be a case of a lot of little trims rather than huge chunks, for example the bits where Dr Mann and Cooper are off exploring could do with tightening up a fair bit. Ditto the opening is a bit of a waste, because while it's trying to establish character the characters aren't developed enough to make it worthwhile. Similarly, I'd want to cut or trim dialogue in various places, starting with every single use of that bloody Dylan Thomas poem. (It's an overused cliché anyway, but using it 4-5 times within one film is just dreadful, like bad teenage poetry about the death of a pet).

Another thing I'm certain about changing is the ending - the existing ending is typical Hollywood nonsense where actually making sense is less important than delivering a reassuring moment of closure. (Cooper's return happens at something like 50 years after his point of departure, given that Murphy is extremely elderly and close to death, and yet Dr Brand still looks to be the same age as when he left her in the ship.) So I'd choose to play up the Kubrick homage and have Cooper send his message to Murphy via the watch (probably trimming those scenes as well), and then place the ending just after the tesseract collapses in on Cooper, fading to white and then cut to black. No "Cooper's handshake", no happy family nonsense, just end with Cooper going through something that he can't comprehend and heading to an unknown fate, just like the Starchild in 2001.

A parting thought: Interstellar is, like Sunshine, a film in which a very good director presents a bunch of visually-excellent and generally-well-thought-through ideas about science-fiction and space travel, only to completely bodge things up sometime after the halfway mark. I don't know what it is about big-budget sciencefiction but it never manages to stick the landing.

Notes towards an Evil Dead: Army Of Darkness short film

This is really a placeholder for something I want to look at in future when I have time, but I've been inspired by the Time Travel Consecution discussion thread on fanedit.org and getting ideas, frustratingly at a time when I'm already backlogged on projects and have no free time to do any work on them.

This is a rough outline of what I've got in mind:

• Start the edit as a standalone story - ie open with something like "This is Ash. He has really bad luck with the undead.", intercutting between the titles and short snippets from past films.
• Drastically shorten the film, down to maybe 15-20 minutes or so. Facilitate this through a combination of stylised on-screen titles and use of Ash's dialogue from elsewhere as voiceover material.
• I'd need to identify single narrative to serve as a shortened throughline for the edit; other short gags can be worked in as well.
• Possibly also use short snippets from Black Knight as a gag (dub over with Bruce Campbell dialogue).

I've got ideas for two possible endings (though I don't know if either of them would work for definite) but I won't post those here because it would take away the fun/surprise if I do eventually get this done.

Cinema/Idle Fanedit Ideas: Gravity

I managed to catch Gravity earlier this week, at one of the few 2D screenings to boot, and was mostly pretty impressed with it. Some magnificent visuals, and while some of the technical details were undoubtedly dodgy it was a pleasure to see a film in which the nature of sound in space wasn't ignored for the sake of lazy storytelling.

Having said that, I have a nasty streak when it comes to this sort of film, and there's a part of me that wanted it to just end with a fade to black when Stone made it to the Soyuz capsule and realised it was out of fuel. Which would probably work, but make the film feel too short, and thematically weird - Stone would essentially come to terms with the fact that she has to work through her grief over her child's death, and then give in and effectively kill herself.

Which got me to thinking that one particularly challenging but interesting option would be to borrow the idea for the conclusion from Berberian Sound Studio, and go for the full absurd/surreal approach to imply this darker ending. Things like dropping the score for exterior scenes (because the score and its use in the third act was a load of old bollocks, to be honest - typical overblown dumbed-down guff), adding shots or entire sequences from other films like Alien (particularly the segments toward the end where Ripley is on the run from the xenomorph), 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek: Into Darkness, fading in and out voices in different languages on Stone's helmet radio, and more. Essentially veer completely away from the "real" ending and instead have the final sequence be one long CO2-induced hallucination such that at the end you don't actually know what's happened to her. If nothing else, it would be more ambiguous and subtle than the hamfisted rebirth motif Cuarón chose to wrap up the film.

Cinema/Idle Fanedit Musings: Prisoners/End Of Watch

I finally caught Prisoners this weekend, and thought it was a pretty good, albeit flawed, film. I think the main issue I had with it was that for a film that's getting so much praise for being clever, it was fairly predictable - if you've seen A History Of Violence and 8MM, you'll recognise pretty much everything that's going on in this film.

It's not a crippling flaw, although the third act does drag quite badly, in my opinion. The core performances and cinematography are very good, and carry the film as much as possible - though it would have helped if the third act didn't substantially change the tone of the film and take the plot into a much more generic direction.

One thing that I found quite odd throughout the film was that Detective Loki constantly works alone, even in several circumstances where it presents an obvious risk. His behaviour doesn't compensate much for those risks, either.

At first this just seemed to be another sloppy aspect of the script, but as I thought about it an alternative explanation suggested itself to me - what if Detective Loki were Brian Taylor from End Of Watch? Both characters are extremely competent police officers, albeit with very different demeanours. I can easily imagine Taylor being traumatised by a combination of PTSD and survivor guilt to the extent that he puts his job in a new city ahead of his personal life, driving his wife away and desperately trying to make up for his partner's death by being a textbook over-achieving police officer. It would also provide a great reason for Loki to insist on working alone.

Bearing in mind that one of the issues I had with Prisoners was its length (which in turn is a result of focusing on two protagonists), I'm thinking that a fanedit that refocuses the film purely on Loki's perspective could work quite nicely, using segments from End Of Watch as flashbacks to round out his character and flesh out his obsessive need to be a supercop.

Cinema: How I Live Now

I saw How I Live Now today, and was reasonably impressed with it. What could've been a tepid YA romance/drama against a wartorn background was instead a film about the outbreak of war in England, which incidentally happens in the vicinity of a passionate teenage romance. Good performances, good cinematography, some clever use of sound and a nastier bite to the details and atmosphere than would usually be found in such a film made for something that was almost as good as Children Of Men.

As a result I found myself thinking of other similar films set in the UK, and am toying with the idea of an edit basically telling the stories of various groups against a backdrop of an apocalyptic war. So far I think 28 Days Later, Children Of Men, How I Live Now, and perhaps Channel 4's recent found-footage dramatisation of the repercussions of a collapse of the National Grid, Blackout. It's a very rough idea, and would take quite a lot of work to polish into a feasible project, but I'll mull it over for a few days and see where it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a short project called The Equation Of Crime, essentially turning Pi into a silent homage to The Element Of Crime. I'm still not sure if it's going to work or not, but it's certainly an interesting challenge. I'll post up more about it, including a first draft of the opening sequence, in a day or two.

Idle Fanedit Ideas: The Lords Of Berberian

Last year, I had the peculiar pleasure of watching Berberian Sound Studio, a film that at both pays great respect to the under-recognised efforts of sound engineers and recordists as part of filmmaking and depicts, in a magnificently surreal manner, Toby Jones' character and his descent into madness. It was an excellent film, with a magnificent soundtrack by Broadcast and a great performance by Jones. If I had to fault it, I would say that the third act necessarily became very strange even within the context of what had preceeded it in the film.

Earlier this year, I watched The Lords Of Salem, Rob Zombie's most recent film. I don't know if I would say it was magnificent, but I certainly enjoyed it and thought it to be very good. Zombie's tendency to cast his wife in every film he makes has irked me in the past, because she's not a particularly good actor, but in this she is surprisingly effective. The story centres around Moon's radio DJ character, who receives an LP of a hitherto-unknown band (the titular Lords Of Salem) and begins to descend into madness and paranoia as a result of the LP. If I had to fault it, I'd say that the ending is somewhat weak - the first and second acts are great, but the apex of the story doesn't really feel climactic enough.

Inspired by Q2's fantastic Memories Alone (which cuts down and meshes The Wrestler with Black Swan, intertwining their two storylines with the change of making Natalie Portman's character the estranged daughter of Mickey Rourke's character), I've been giving some consideration to how the storylines of Berberian Sound Studio and Lords Of Salem might be overlapped.

There are a few problems:

• Lords is set in Salem, Berberian in Italy.
• Lords appears to be set in the present day, Berberian is a period piece set in the 70s
• There's no immediately obvious way to have any characters from the two films meet or interact.

Nonetheless, the idea does have some potential. Since both films will need to be cut down, I think the way to proceed would be to cut down any elements of Lords that make it glaringly obvious to a casual viewer that the period is wrong - I'm thinking things like technology here rather than clothing or props. Then cut Berberian such that the film being edited is an English-language feature - ie Lords Of Salem.

Given how strange and unsettling both films are, I think there's also scope for some experimentation with things like suggesting a crossing-over between films (eg maybe have Toby Jones opening or closing a door, then cutting to Sherri Moon Zombie responding to that door and not making it entirely clear what's happened).

At the moment this is just another idea percolating at the back of my mind - it'll have to remain that until at least such a time as I pick up Berberian Sound Studio on DVD and can make some notes on its structure. I think it's a promising idea, and one I look forward to experimenting with in future.

Cinema/Idle Fanedit Ideas: Pacific Rim & Now You See Me

I went to see Pacific Rim recently. It was a lot of Big Robots Punching Big Monsters fun, and I really enjoyed it. It's not a perfect film, however - the great cast is given some almost paper thin characters and little chance to flesh them out. The action sequences are great and achieve what many blockbusters in the last couple of years have failed - which was to hold my attention and interest all the way through the third act, and the effects are magnificent.

It occured to me, however, that there might be some interesting mileage in an edit combining Darabont's The Mist, Del Toro's Pacific Rim, and Edwards' Monsters - basically having The Mist as Act 1, where the creatures appear for the first time and cause havoc; Pacific Rim as Act 2, where human society gets to grips with the idea of these monster attacks happening regularly and comes up with ways to stop them; and Monsters as Act 3, where we see a post-monster world where the defences in many areas have failed but the big monsters are no longer the threat they were previously.

I also watched Now You See Me, a similarly-engaging and fun film about a group of magicians who team up for a series of heists. It was mostly very good, though it could do with some pruning in the third act - it becomes quite expository and spends a little bit too much time spelling out how certain tricks were achieved even though you've already been given enough information to work this out. I enjoyed it, though, and would quite happily watch it again so I may pick it up once it's out on DVD and see what can be done to fix its few flaws.

Cinema/Idle fanedit ideas: World War Z

I made the rather silly decision to watch World War Z recently. I did not enjoy the experience, because it was in my opinion a bad film, for a number of reasons. Frustratingly, I found that there were a few clever or promising moments within it - and had they build upon those moments, it could have at least become a solid if unexceptional film about a truly global zombie outbreak, with a scale beyond anything we've seen so far.

Warning : spoilers follow. If you don't want 'em, stop reading.

Unfortunately, even in the first ten minutes the film nails its colours to the mast - the quite-nicely-done scene showing the collapse of societal order in New York is marred by Magical Physics-Defying vehicles like a dumptruck that can plow through an entire city block's worth of cars, crushing them and tossing them aside, without losing any momentum. The CGI for large crowds is unexceptional at best, and clearly false-looking all too often. Which is sad, because my most recent preferred reference point for this would be either The Divide or Fase 7.

Beyond this, the closest the film gets to solid scenes in my opinion is when Gerry Lane lands, with virologist and SEAL team in two, in South Korea to try and track down Patient Zero. They meet some broadly competent soldiers and collect some confusing (and subsequently ignored) information that contradicts previous details about how infection works, and then it all goes to hell because, in preparation for a complex operation in which silence is absolutely essential, Gerry Lane doesn't think to turn off his mobile phone and - wouldn't you know it? - his wife attempts to call at an inopportune moment. Cue zombies chomping on all around him. (It didn't help that, after being told to keep absolutely quiet, several characters are then shown cycling to a specific location on badly-oiled squeaking bicycles....)

After here, the film goes downhill - the action sequences try to up the scale but don't succeed in engaging you (again, too much cheap-looking CGI), and the narrative is hobbled by a need to location-hop while ignoring a far more obvious alternative course of action - including an inexplicable and ridiculous final journey, where the focus is scaled down to be more intimate.

I don't particularly imagine WWZ will be particularly salvageable, myself. Certainly I think the theatrical version is a disappointing mess, a complete turd in the punchbowl if held to the quality standard set by the book.

So I have an alternative idle notion for a fanedit. A book-version of the film, which would use the expanded audiobook as its starting point, and use a combination of stock footage and footage from other zombie films to provide the visuals. Structurally, it might be better to approach this as a miniseries rather than as a film, but in any case I think this would almost certainly result in something more interesting than the mess of a film currently in theatres.

Idle fanedit ideas: Oblivion

Like many faneditors, new or veteran, I find I have lots more ideas for fanedits than I have time to work on them. In particular I have a number of projects I'd like to tackle, but which will require better skills or tools than I currently have.

 I figure it couldn't hurt to take some of the less pressing ideas and to a brief write-up of them; if nothing else it's good exercise in thinking through the process of restructuring the narrative and trying to spot any obvious problems.

First up, Oblivion.

I saw this with my nephew (who's closer to the target audience age than I am) and his dad (who's not). It wasn't bad, as far as high-concept blockbusters go, but I found it frustrating that it lifted good ideas from a bunch of far better films but didn't bother meshing them into a particularly convincing whole. A lot of what's on screen is actually pretty good, surprisingly - heck, the blatantly-stolen-from-Moon plotline about Cruise's character even gives us a reason to forgive Tom Cruise basically playing Tom Cruise. But it never really takes off.

Personally, I would have opened with a trimmed version of the original space mission; voices would have radio crackle and other effects applied to try and disguise the fact that it's Jack and Sally speaking. We'd basically find out that the Odyssey was on a mission within the Solar system and was redirected when an extraplanetary object of some sort was found, then cut to silence and the title. If I wanted to have fun with it, I'd possibly use some footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Sunshine and try to swap in dialogue fragments from GlaDOS in Portal 1 & 2 in place of Sally's voice.

I'd see if anything could be done with the clumsily expository opening narration - perhaps see if we can frame it so that this is part of the conversation between Jack and Julia. The film would then progress normally from here to the encounter in the football field.

I'd trim as much of the American Football reminiscence on the ground as possible (perhaps cutting it to "I heard about that game." "Please don't say it was a classic." "It was a classic!"), because we need at least a little bit of banter between Vic and Jack to show how they work together.

I'd also try and trim the scenes showing the Scavs, to limit how much we see of them - because the subsequent reveal that they're human is anything but a reveal in the theatrical release. It needs to be more surprising.

I'd also try and cut back the flashback scenes as well - they were horrendously clumsy, as was the reveal with Julia. They'd need pruning, but it might be possible to make them work better by fitting them into the rest of the film in a non-linear manner. Alternatively, I'd do what I could with filters and distortion to garble them and make them more mysterious/confusing since Jack's supposed to have had his memories wiped.

Unfortunately, I'd really like to excise the scene where the three drones break into the Scav's base and wreak havoc, because it doesn't really make sense and reeks of being contrived to allow the plot to end with Jack and Breech being space cowboys. If at all possible, I'd prefer the drone to be faulty from the beginning and Jack to suggest flying up there because it's the easiest solution. I'd remove the couple of bits suggesting Julia's going up, because there's no payoff to tricking the audience about her presence or absence in the Tet - the deception is only necessary for TetSally.

The trip up to the Tet would have an abridged version of the original sequence - since we already known about the Odyssey's journey from the start of the film, I'd fade into the sequence when the Tet locks them with a tractor beam and leave it unfold from there; though I'd consider cutting back to Jack piloting the ship with just the soundtrack overlaid occasionally, to keep the momentum of his flight to the Tet going.

If possible, I'd trim the cheesiness of some of the interaction between Breech, Jack and TetSally within the Tet itself. After the explosion, I'd fade to black - no expository demonstration of the dones deactivating, no nonsense with Tech 52 finding Julia. Ideally, I'd find footage (possibly from Predators or a similar film) to suggest that humans have persevered and life continues, albeit in a technologically limited manner for the time being.

I don't know if I'll bother picking Oblivion up on DVD, much less attempting an edit of it. Maybe once it's in the £5-or-less bins at my local supermarket. But these are my notions for how to tighten it up and redress the balance between the ideas and the action, because it started with a good pedigree by virtue of the films from which its screenwriters took inspiration.