• Bible Films Blog

    Looking at film interpretations of the stories in the Bible - past, present and future, as well as preparation for a future work on Straub/Huillet's Moses und Aron and a few bits and pieces on biblical studies.


    Name:
    Matt Page

    Location:
    U.K.












    Sunday, December 08, 2019

    Greatest Heroes of the Bible: The Story of Noah


    In terms of biblical chronology, this is the earliest story, and whilst the series wasn't broadcast in biblical order - the episode covering the Tower of Babel didn't air for another six months, for example - the first part of it did screen on the series' first day (Campbell and Pitts). The episode is presented as a single/joint episode in the complete box set that was released on DVD a couple of years ago.

    The programme starts with a five minute creation sequence, very much in the mould of Huson's The Bible (1966) but with only a fraction of the budget. Then we are introduced to the main story, with a a certain amount of invented subplot to flesh things out a little. Here it takes what would is looking like the standard plot line for the series. God's "hero" is part of a tiny band of the faithful who take on a larger majority who are indifferent, if not openly hostile, to God. When conflict arises God intervenes in dramatic fashion. I've still got a way to work through the series but most of the episodes I have already reviewed follow this pattern. Slavery is a common motif - almost the defining sin of those who oppose God. As usual the invented parts of the plot are spruced up with biblical language even if it is found in completely the wrong context. "You shall surely die" Noah is warned at one point by the city's Karmir (with echoes of Airplane).

    Here Noah is specifically marked out as a proto-John the Baptist - he even describes himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. Noah is played by Lew Ayres, whose career almost spanned back to the silent era, though he is best known for his role for 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front and for being Dr. Kildare in nine movies filmed in the early 1940s. Ayres, a conscientious objector in WWII cuts a far more sympathetic figure than Russell Crowe in Aronofsky's recent Noah (2014). That said, there is one scene from Aronfsky's film that is very similar to one here, where the people of the local settlement, spurred on by their charismatic if self-obsessed patriarch, attack the ark just moments before the rains come.

    Special effects are somewhat mixed. A now familiar drawn-on bolt of lightning accounts for the city's high priest. Likewise God's voice comes from a billowing cloud. Aside from that the use of (presumably) a miniature ark combined well with footage that shows a torrent rushing through trees, and people slipping off rocks into the water. The effects are rather undermined by other shots and sequencing, however. Noah and his family emerge from the ark into the bone-dry, arid deserts of (presumably) Southern California, looking as if it hasn't seen rain for months, rather than having been under water until recently.

    Ayres does a pretty good job in the lead role, even if he is given some rather pungent dialogue at times. The acting of those who oppose him is pretty hammy, but again, that's emerging as a standard feature of the series as a whole.

    ==========
    Campbell, Richard H. and Pitts, Michael R., (1981) The Bible on Film: A Checklist, 1897-1980, Metuchen, N.J., & London: The Scarecrow Press.

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    Sunday, September 23, 2018

    The Bible: In the Beginning (1966)


    The Bible (John Huston, 1966) has come to be known, somewhat unfairly, as the film that killed the biblical epic. It's a charge that somehow persists despite three major objections. Firstly, it hardly makes sense to blame a single film for destroying a genre, and even if did, that accusation should surely be pointed at The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) which blew £25 million for very little return, rather than at this. Secondly because rather than being an example of the worst of the genre it is surely one of it's best. Indeed, in concluding his masterful survey of the films of the Hebrew Bible, Jon Solomon cites it as one of the three "most representative and iconographical Old Testament depictions of the twentieth century" (175).

    More significantly, of course is the fact that rumours of the genre's demise turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Whilst Jesus Christ, Superstar, released just seven short years later, is not exactly an epic, it would have seemed hard to argue in 1973, that the Hollywood Bible film was enjoying anything other than reasonable health.

    Huston himself was one of the greatest figures in Hollywood. He burst onto the scene in 1941 with the brilliant PI flick The Maltese Falcon before heading to the front line of World War II and creating a series of documentaries for the army. Key Largo and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (both 1948) reunited him with Bogart, as did The African Queen (1951) and the spoof, Beat the Devil (1953) and his catalogue of famous films extended all the way beyond Prizzi's Honor in 1985. In between times he found time to continue the Hollywood dynasty founded by his father Walter, with three of his five children (Anjelica, Tony and Danny) going on to have prominent roles in Hollywood, as well as his grandson Jack, who had the lead role in the 2016 version of Ben-Hur.

    Houston acted too., Most famously in Polanski's Chinatown (1974), but also here as an amiable Noah. Both Alec Guinness and Charlie Chaplin had initially been considered for the role, but Huston brings a cheerful sense of purpose to the impending destruction of humankind.  All this however is only after a masterful creation sequence and the sight of Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd cavorting in the altogether behind a series of strategically-placed plants.

    For the opening sequences, Huston narrates the opening chapter of Genesis over a series of stunning collection of images of the natural world: molten lava bubbles and flows as the land is separated from the sea; a gigantic sun rises, and moves across the skies, as the greater light is brought forth; and swarms of fish burst through the waters of the deep, as the creatures of the seas are created.

    What is impressive about the creation sequence, in addition to the jaw dropping beauty of the images, is the way they so skilfully plot a course between a seven-day type literalist interpretation on the one hand, and more metaphorical readings on the other. Just like the written text, the viewer looks at the raw material and is able to apply their own interpretation. Furthermore, even after numerous nature documentaries and a number of cheap rip-offs the sequence still creates a sense of awe, even if Huston's use of the archaic King James Version and one of the more conventional parts of the soundtrack date things a little.

    The soundtrack excels elsewhere however. Following the creation of Adam, and then Eve the fall and the scenes where Cain (Richard Harris) kills his brother are accompanied by more atonal music. This combined with the bizarre poses Harris strikes, and the low and then high camera angles make this whole sequence strange and disorientating. Whilst the narration is rigidly literal to the text, the film uses the more cinematic elements of image and sound to suggest this more mythical reading.

    The one exception to this is Huston's Noah segment, which goes for more of a light-hearted family comedy feel. Gone is the slavish dependence (or at least the appearance of it) on the biblical text. Instead get other characters get to speak, such as Noah's wife who doesn't quite understand what is happening and Noah's disbelieving compatriots insulting him and calling him "stupid".Noah himself gets to use words and phrases not found in the text of Genesis such as when he suggests that the tigers are "only great cats" who can survive on milk from the other animals. Interspersed with this we get Huston mugging for the camera, visual jokes about the tortoises being last on to the arc and the slapstick spectacle of Noah sticking his foot in a bucket of pitch and sliding down the top deck. It's not that these homely touches are necessarily that bad, just that they feel somewhat out of place with the broody, otherworldly tone struck by the rest of the film. Huston rarely appeared in his own pictures, and perhaps this misstep gives a suggestion as to why. With that on top of having to manage an on-set zoo, it's hardly surprising he was repeatedly heard to quip "I don't know how God managed, I'm having a terrible time" (Huston 320).

    In some ways, however, the film's episodic and inconsistent nature does mark it as a film of transition. Following the poor box office performance by both The Bible and The Greatest Story Ever Told, big studios seemed more reluctant to outlay immense budgets for biblical epics. Instead the 70s were featured the broadcast of numerous made-for-TV series marking the "migration of biblical narratives into the medium of television" (Meyer 232).

    The rest of the film returns to this more pre-historic feel, aided by some fantastic high contrast lighting with gives so much of the film this eerie aura. Stephen Boyd's Nimrod, complete with a painted on mono-brow, shots his arrow to the sky and quickly finds there is no longer anyone who can understand his orders and then we swiftly move on to the sight of George C. Scott's Abraham leaving Ur.

    Again the film does well presenting the main stories here (birth of Ishmael, visitation of the angels, the fall of Sodom and the aborted sacrifice of Isaac) in biblically faithful fashion whilst also questioning the legitimacy of that presentation. Particularly strange is the sight of Abraham's three ethereal visitors interchangeably using Peter O'Toole's head and an orgy scene dreamed up for Sodom that is more creepy than it is titillating.

    The way these scenes pan out leaves Abraham's story, which comprises almost the film's entire second act, as some sort of hope for humanity, even as it hints of the rocky, even traumatic road ahead. The jump from a scene of he and Isaac walking stealthily through the chillingly charred remains of Sodom, to preparing for Abraham to kill his child, provokes anger rather than reverence. Abraham is troubled, but also haunted by the temperamental God who commands him. His willingness to sacrifice his son is more an act of fear of what might happen if he refuses than one of faithful service.

    It's a fitting end to what is - in contrast to the majority of epics that went before it - "a personal film on a gigantic scale (Forshey 146). In some ways that is far more reflective of Genesis itself. Whilst chapter one paints of a broad scale, from there on in it's the story of God with a string of individuals - Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Huston's film not only gets this, but its highly literal narration, in tandem with its dark and primitive feel, underlines the mythological nature of the texts giving much of the film a strange sense of the dawn of time, and the primitive nature of the cultures involved. Whilst the change of tone in the Noah section is a little misplaced, it's hard to deny to boldness of Huston's artistic vision.
    ================
    - Forshey, Gerald E. (1992) American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars Westport CT: Praeger.
    - Huston, John (1981) An Open Book. London: Macmillian.
    - Meyer, Stephen C. (2015) Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
    - Solomon, Jon. (2001) The Ancient World in the Cinema, (Revised and expanded edition). New Haven: Yale University Press.

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    Friday, October 27, 2017

    La Sacra Bibbia/After Six Days (1920)


    With so many silent films lost to the ages, we should be grateful even for those where the remains are only part of what was originally projected. Nevertheless, it's hard not to be a little aggrieved that the print of La Sacra Bibbia (also known as just La Bibbia) that remains is a butchered version edited down for a re-issue. Indeed Sacra Bibbia was reissued at least twice, once in 1929 (as After Six Days) at the advent of the sound era, and once as late a 1946, for which a trailer was put together boasting of a $3 million and promising a cast of 10,000. The film's publicists also made much of the film being shot at the "exact locations" though the artefacts that are shown seem more like modern re-creations than the famous landmarks themselves.

    The version that remains is the 1929 version, edited down from the original and replacing the original (reference free) title cards with an earnest, but dull narration. According to Campbell and Pitts La Bibbia was released as a series of one reelers (1981: 12) and a copy of the original Joseph reel found it's way into the Joye collection and survives in the BFI's archive. The fragment (which I reviewed here) indicates some of what was lost. In addition to the intertitles, the re-issue also cropped the image, disastrously on more than a few occasions.

    What remains, however, is still a testament to what was the strength of the Italian silent epic. It was in Italy that the historical epic was born (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, 1908) and for all the attention given to Griffith's Birth of a Nation it was Cabiria that took the epic film to a whole new level. Indeed Griffith is reputed to have admitted Cabiria inspired him to make Intolerance what it was. La Bibbia retains much of the grandeur and spectacle of those films and in its own right contains numerous shots for which it deserves to be remembered.

    The film was directed by Armando Vay and Dr Piero Antonio Gariazzo. These days Gariazzo is better remembered for his commentary than his filmmaking. Bertilini only mentions him for his 1919 book Il Teatro Muto and his expression of a sentiment more widely connected with Alfred Hitchcock, "Whether they are skilled or not, film actors and actresses are like puppets" (Bertilini 2013: 259).

    Unsurprisingly the acting is not particularly memorable, but the compositions and imagery are what really stand out. The earliest scenes give a sense of creation and must have inspired Huston and Dino De Laurentiis' sort-of remake in 1966. Eve appears for the first time as smoke rises from Adam's sleeping body. The two frolic in the garden before embracing and taking a bit out of the forbidden fruit almost simultaneously. Moments later a furtive Cain, dominating the foreground and shooting furious looks directly at the camera forlornly pokes his sacrifice knowing it will fail whilst in the rear of the shot, almost off camera, his brother contentedly carries on.

    The brief scenes of the Ark and are unspectacular, but nevertheless the curve of the unfinished boat's hull and the struts that support it form a pleasing backdrop to shots of Noah and his family. Once the rains come in earnest, however, the images are far more disturbing. First Doré's "The Deluge" is evoked as people desperately climb on a rock hoping for salvation; then a wider shot of dead bodies piled up just above the rising waters as the rains continue to lash down; then finally a double exposure brings the camera closer to some of these, now ghostly, corpses floating away whilst the camera ploughs on in the opposite direction.

    However it's the Tower of Babel that lives longest in the memory. Here's it's depicted as a towering ziggurat, so colossal that it's top disappears into the clouds off the top of even an ultra-wide shot. It both reflects and emboldens Bruegel's famous painting (1563) and Doré's engraving (1865) amongst others, soaring above the seemingly minute people milling about below. Another highlight of these opening scenes is the spectacular destruction of Sodom, as the disastrous angelic visit to Lot ends in brimstone raining down on the city in a whirl of sparks and smoke.

    In contrast to these more eye-catching, spectacular scenes, the Joseph episode neatly emphasises Mrs Potiphar's obsession with him, notably the voyeuristic pleasure she finds secretly watching him. In a darkened foreground she watches him silently through a grill, briefly facing the camera as she bites her bottom lip in ecstasy. The theme of the audience watching someone watching someone else has been replayed numerous times since, another reminder of Hitchcock. When Pharaoh remembers his dreams a matte shot shows cows running above his head, before animated stalks of wheat appear. The section's use of low and high angles to reinforce the power dynamics of the courtroom scene.

    Moses' appearance on the big screen here was possibly the last time before DeMille made his indelible mark two or three years later. The differences are striking. For example rather than carrying around a mighty staff, Moses' rod is more reminiscent of a magic wand. Suddenly it feels like DeMille might have been compensating for something. Moses also has horns in the style of Michelangelo's statue (1513-1515) - just one of a number of ways in which the film's portrayal resembles the famous sculpture, something DeMille made much of when promoting his 1956 remake with Charlton Heston. That said, the crossing of the Red Sea - here portrayed using a rather clumsy matte shot - is not a patch on DeMille's first attempt just a few years later.

    Indeed after such a striking first half the second part of the film is less impressive. Once Moses has installed Joshua as his successor and wandered up the mountain to meet his maker, the remaining footage skips to the story of Solomon, perhaps suggesting that a scenario or two are missing here. Solomon shows his wisdom, threatens to cut a baby in half before being wowed by the Queen of Sheba in a scene full of over-the-top headdresses. Eventually he ends up a pagan orgy with her in scenes strongly reminiscent of the later Solomon and Sheba (1959).

    By then, the film, or this cut of it at least, has rather lost its way and like the Hebrew Bible itself, the narrative thread rather trails off. Nevertheless, there is so much to be appreciated in the rest of the film it is a shame that it has had so little attention,  neither amongst silent cinema fans, nor amongst academics. Even if what we have is only a pale reflection of what once was, La Sacra Bibbia deserves to be better remembered.

    ==========================
    - Bertilini, Giogio (ed.) Silent Italian Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
    - Campbell, Richard C. and Pitts, Michael R. (1981) The Bible on Film: A Checklist, 1897–1980, Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press.
    - Gariazzo, Piero Antonio (1919) Il Teatro Muto Turin: Lattes, cited in Pitassio, Francesco (2013) Famous Actors, Famous |Actresses: Notes on Acting Style in Italian Silent Films" cited in Bertilini, Giogio (ed.) Silent Italian Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p.259

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    Sunday, October 08, 2017

    Noah (2014)


    In comparison to the majority of Bible movies, films about Noah have tended to take a more creative approach to telling the story. Michael Curtiz's 1929 Noah's Ark wraps the main story up in a "modern" day train crash story; thimbles and pipe cleaners lend a distinct charm to Disney's 1959 stop motion short of the same name; and the 1999 TV film, also of the same name, bizarrely combines the story of Noah with that of Lot.

    Darren Aronofsky's Noah (2014), then, is hardly the first film about Noah to take a more creative approach. His is a mythic take, on a story which permeated so many different ancient cultures. Whilst this version is clearly an adaptation of the Jewish version of the story - and whilst Aronofsky himself is an atheist, his Jewish background has clearly been influential - the fantastical approach he has taken with his subject matter works to evoke a story that was known to far more people groups than simply the descendants of Jacob.

    Aronofsky particularly seems to revel in the fact that the Bible is often a strange book, and that few parts of it embody that 'oddness' more than Genesis. Indeed, I don't think you've really taken the Bible seriously until you acknowledge this inherent oddness. Take for example these words from the prologue to the Noah story:
    "When people began to multiply...and daughters were born to them, the 'sons of God' saw that they were fair and took wives for themselves... the 'sons of God' went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them..." (Gen 6:1-4)
    And that's one of the passages that Aronofsky leaves out. Add in those making covenants by dismembering animal carcasses and perambulating between them; Lot sleeping with both his daughters on consecutive nights, and Abraham being just moments away from sacrificially chopping up his only son and you have one weird book. Of course, Genesis is not necessarily endorsing all the  actions it describes. However, all too often people behave as if that the world of Genesis was broadly similar to out own, where people thought, felt and generally acted in a similar manner to the way in which we do today, despite the substantial evidence to the contrary, not least in our main source for these very stories.

    What I most appreciate about Aronofsky's Noah, therefore, is that he grasps, and indeed seems to relish, this strange 'otherness'. The film was over twenty years in the making after a project at school on the subject first caught his attention. The result is probably the first Bible film to feel like a cross between Lord of the Rings, Waterworld and Mad Max. As John Wilson put it, Noah isn't so much an adaptation, as a film that uses Genesis as a "mood board" (Front Row, 2014). The resulting film posses a strangely uneven style which many have disliked, but again this is what makes the film so bizarre and so interesting.

    On the surface of course, it's a biblical epic and some of the scenes that Aronofsky has created here are amongst the very best in the genre. Chief among them are the minutes leading up to the launch of the ark which, on the big screen at least, are spectacular. Noah rescues his son Ham from the descendants of Cain, escapes to the ark whilst the 'watchers' protect the ark from the on-rushing hordes, which culminates in their angelic souls spectacularly beaming back up to heaven just as the waters of the deep break forth lifting the ark up and away.  Clint Mansell's score, quite different from the kind of music he has typically produced for Aronofsky, ratchets up the tension magnificently. It maybe the 21st century, but it nevertheless feels very like the moment the Red Sea parts in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.

    But this sequence also contains exactly those elements which feel so very far away from the kind of movie that DeMille and his ilk would ever have produced. The 'watchers' are angels (the Nephilim of Gen 4) who have quite literally fallen to earth, and found as they crashed to earth that the earth, or rather its rock, has clung to their bodies. The resulting 'rock monsters' look like the kind of special effect Ray Harryhausen might have created for Jason and the Argonauts (1963). When they die defending the ark their souls are sucked back up to heaven in great beams of light that feels like something from Independence Day.

    The movie's other breathtaking sequence also illustrates the diverse mix of styles that Aronofsky brings together. Shortly after the launch of the ark, Noah retells his family the story of creation accompanied by a time-lapse-styled montage portraying an evolutionary act of creation with a hint of stop-motion. The sequence ends at the Tree of Life (with all the echoes of Aronofsky's earlier The Fountain) with a glowing snakeskin wrapped around Noah's arm like tefillin straps. Throw in the lunar-esque Icelandic landscape; a cameo from Anthony Hopkins that veers a little too closely to Billy Crystal's turn in The Princess Bride; and Noah's nightmares alternating between blood underfoot and water overhead, and it's not hard to see why many dislike the film's unevenness.

    The unevenness both unsettles viewers and hints at the divergent sources that lay behind the version that is cherished today. It's not that Aronofsky has pinpointed the exact cultural context of the original stories. He hasn't and clearly didn't intended to. But he has created a context where some of the questions that the text raises, and that the story's characters would have had to face, can be explored. In particular the time spent on the ark during the flood, so often skipped over in other versions of the story, turns into a dark psychological drama, as Noah feels inescapably drawn to take The Creator's work to its grimly 'logical' conclusion by ending even his own family line.

    It's a film, then, that takes seriously the nature of the destruction that "The Creator" (as God is called in this version) unleashes during this story - a point that few critics seemed to appreciated. Ironically, many Christians railed against the film's portrayal of Noah as a homicidal maniac, overlooking the fact that of course the number of deaths at Noah's hands are only a fraction of those who drown in the flood sent by God. To assess this film's Noah as a psychopath is something of a miscalculation. Noah doesn't want to kill his granddaughter - and in fact ultimately he cannot - he just believes that this is what his creator is calling him to do. Noah's readiness to follow even the most horrific of his creator's commands brings him into similar territory as Abraham, sacrificing his offspring because he is convinced God wills it.

    As Peter Chattaway has observed, Aronofsky's other films "often dwell on the idea that purity or perfection is impossible, and that the pursuit of these things is self-destructive." (Chattaway 2014). It's not hard to see how the filmmakers unpack similar themes in Noah. Noah's environmentalist perfectionism is such that he rebukes his child for picking a flower; his destructive obsession drives him to almost kill his grandchild. On a physical level the floodwaters have destroyed the world, but there is also huge destruction on an emotional level. Little wonder that the film's epilogue opens with Noah, alone, getting drunk on the beach. Years before this film was released Aronofsky described this as an indication of Noah's "survivor's guilt" (Aronofsky, 2007), but Noah is also continuing to agonise over the questions which dominated the film's third act. Was he was right or wrong to spare Ila's child? Has his 'compassion' ultimately doomed the world to be destroyed by humans all over again? How can he face his family given how close he came to committing such an horrific act? It's no coincidence that Aronofsky framing of Crowe's Noah repeatedly echoes the famous final shot of The Searchers (1956).

    It's here that his daughter-in-law Ila's words help rehabilitate Noah, in the eyes of his family, to himself, and also, to some extent, to the viewer:
    He chose you for a reason, Noah. He showed you the wickedness of man and knew you would not look away. And you saw goodness too. The choice was put in your hands because he put it there. He asked you to decide if we were worth saving. And you chose mercy. You chose love. He has given us a second chance. Be a father, be a grandfather. Help us to do better this time. Help us start again."
    On all three fronts the rehabilitation is only partly successful, such trauma is not easily overcome, but it does manage to leave the film on a positive note, whilst also challenging its audience to re-examine its own environmental credentials. This, then, is a more hopeful ending than Aronofsky's later mother! which suggests that this film's second chance, if it even is only a second chance, is doomed to fail and will ultimately lead The Creator to endlessly destroy and misguidedly restart the world again. Here though, the despair is not yet so overwhelming. Noah may have begun amidst environmental apocalypse (with an implied modern parallel), but it ends still offering us a fig leaf of hope, urging us to act before its too late.

    ===============================
    Aronofsky, Darren (2007). "Just Say Noah" Interviewed by Ryan Gibley for The Guardian, 27 April. Available online - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/apr/27/1

    Chattaway, Peter T., (2014) "Flood Theology" in Books and Culture Vol 20 No.3 (May/June 2014)
    Available online - http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2014/mayjun/flood-theology.html?paging=off

    Front Row (2014) BBC Radio 4, 4 April. Available online - https://soundcloud.com/front-row-weekly/fr-kate-winslet-richard-ayoade

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    Friday, May 15, 2015

    Two by Two/Ooops Noah has Gone (2015)


    Earlier in the year the BBC’s Tony Jordan told us the first draft of his script for The Ark ended with the first drop of rain. Now it’s two months later and for this new Noah movie that’s the starting point rather than it’s end.

    You see whereas many Noah films are concerned with the protagonist and his struggle with his role, in this one Noah is entirely absent. Instead the focus is on the animals on-board the ark, or rather those that are not quite on-board. You see somehow our hero Finny, and his new friend Leah have missed the boat, literally. Finny wasn't meant to be on it in the first place. He and his dad Dave had stowed away on board disguised as the other half of Leah’s family. But when the two go exploring they get separated and end up not being on-board when the ark gets swept away.

    It all leads to a Finding Nemo type plot only involving two children and two parents (Leah’s mum, Hazel, is also part of the cast). There’s been criticism in some circles for that similarity of theme, but I don’t think those are warranted. Separation of children from their parents is such a primal fear (in both directions) that it’s territory worth exploring - let's face it, it even crops up in the story of Jesus. And the way that plot device is used to examine the issue is fairly different and different themes emerge.

    One of the most interesting of these is the way the film examines the issue of nature versus nurture. Other films look at how we can break free from our upbringing, or move past traumatic experiences from the past. By assigning personality traits to the evolutionary make up of species Two by Two is able to look at the issue of how much of who we are is due to hard wiring and how we might overcome it. Leah and Hazel are grimps - their status as aggressive loners is built into their DNA. Yet the film raises the possibility that they might even overcome the limitations of their birth, such that, by extension it suggests, so might we. In a not dissimilar vein it also seems to advance the theory that if we can discover the place we really fit we can thrive in a way we might never have thought possible.

    Part of the reason that the film can explore these issues is because rather than using known and familiar animals as its lead characters, it uses made up ones instead. This raises interesting possibilities in a way that using rabbits and guinea pigs would not. Had it used familiar animals then any sense of tension would be gone - the audience would know in advance that their survival was guaranteed. Here, whilst it seems unlikely that all of the leading characters are going to be wiped out, it does suggest some latitude, particularly when you bring evolution and adaption into the mix as well. It opens up a range of options and lead to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion.

    Sadly, for me at least, it doesn't really have a great deal to say about the biblical story of the flood. The basics are there (although the eponymous two by two rule is seemingly not adhered to religiously) and it’s an interesting idea to take away the human focus, but it doesn't have much to offer in its place. There are a number of moments when the characters pull through in unlikely ways, but these are clearly just down to a question of genre rather than God-acting-in-mysterious-ways moments. Everything just happens because it does and leaves the whole film feeling like an unsatisfying plot device. The original story has layers of meaning - it’s an origins story, a story of faithfulness, of a god purging his subjects, of deliverance and of new creation. None of these themes really emerge and the film ending where it does leaves little conclusion other than a bit of self realisation.

    The other thing that was lacking, for me at least, was humour. I stress the personal angle in this not merely because humour is notoriously subjective, but also because I’m wary of veering into abusing national stereotypes. The film is a collaboration between Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland and three of those nations have a notably poor reputation for humour amongst the English. I strongly suspect it’s just a difference in what one is used to. Nevertheless, it did seem like it would have been rather easy to inject a little more humour at numerous points in the story. Humour that would be a bit more lowest common denominator (meant in the original, rather than the more modern - and derisory - sense).

    Overall Two by Two: Ooops Noah is Gone is not a bad little film. I enjoyed it more than I expected and the kids did as well, and some of its lessons are certainly valuable. But it’s not really a Noah film, it just came along for the ride.

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    Tuesday, March 31, 2015

    The Ark (2015)


    I must admit I'm a big fan of Darren Aronofsky's Noah from 2014. It's a huge, dark exploration of- some of the textual and philosophical issues surrounding the flood story written in bold, dramatic tones. Tony Jordan's The Ark is not those things, indeed it's a very different take on the story, but none the worse for that. Out go the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, in come the warm dry Moroccan dessert. Out goes the grunting, moody grit of Russell Crowe and in comes the quirky warmth of David Threlfall, no less determined, but very much in his own fashion. Out goes the primitive, mythical operatic style of Aronofsky's film and in it's place we find an approach that probably owes more to soap opera than anything.

    Both films have been criticised for their dialogue: Crowe et al. talk in that way which is so familiar from epic films - a sort of halfway between Yoda and Frankenstein’s monster; Threlfall and family for lacking gravitas. The truth is that we don’t know how they spoke. And whilst the importance and severity of the situation Noah foresaw is enough to make anyone strip their sentences down to the bare minimum, it’s also likely that aspects of Noah’s normal family life remained as well, like catching up with cousins at a wake.

    So Jordan’s comes into it’s own. To the cynics, of course, it’s the easiest of targets. The Bible film genre is easier than most to poke fun at, purely for it’s own existence; but somehow the story of Noah is the largest and slowest moving fish in a particularly well-crammed barrel. But if you want to use film to explore the stories of the Bible, and to think about what they might have to say about our relationship to the word today then using a modern soap-operaesque approach is as legitimate as any. INdeed the nature of myth through the ages has been taking an old story and reworking it in a way that your new audience relates to.

    Interestingly The Ark starts with a shot taken under water. In a film about a flood there’s barely a drop of the stuff on display. The Ark is surely the driest Noah film on record. Not only is it set in arid desert, but the rains don’t start until the last ten minutes and even then the time spent afloat is over before it’s really started. Even the post-flood scenes take place against a sandy, dry background, asif the Ark’s inhabitants had wanted to hang on, just in case it was going to start up again.

    So the film’s wettest scene is actually of Noah’s sons, and then the patriarch himself, enjoying a bonding moment in a local oasis. It’s an indication of the way the relationships will continue throughout the film. Noah is a friendly, loved and admired father. Even when his sons think he may have lost his mind they can’t quite entirely rule out the possibility that he might be right. Time and again they honour him for the way he has brought them up.

    Whilst the film overall relies rather more on the Bible that on the Qur'an, in one important aspect it follows the Islamic version of the story - Noah has four sons rather than the more familiar three. From the moment he appears on screen you get the same feeling you have for the fate of anyone who beams down from the Starship Enterprise wearing Any sense of foreboding that presents the viewer with is only heightened by the realisation that the fourth son, Kenan, is played by the excellent Nico Mirallegro.

    Perhaps it's just because I last saw him in his excellent performance in 2014's Common, but the moment he appeared on screen as Noah's fourth son, I got the same feeling I used to get whenever an unknown actor in a red jumper beamed down from the Starship Enterprise. Somehow someone's not going to be on board at the end of the film. Either way Mirallegro is reprising the role of a young man whose punishment seems somewhat out of proportion to his “crimes”.

    But Mirallegro’s Kenan, with the link to the land of Canaan which only becomes explicit in the final scene, is where, I suspect, Jordan’s wrestles most earnestly with his subject matter. Early in the film the distinctions are more black or white (perhaps a little too literally). One the one hand is Noah a believer in God. On the other the city dwellers who worship not, as would have been most likely, an assortment of local and/or ancestral deities but instead are pre-historic new atheists. It’s a little cringeworthy, but Kenan adopts Noah’s arguments against atheism, even at one point, parrotting his argument that "[o]nly an idiot would say there is no god because to say that you'd need to know everything, and only an idiot would think they do".

    Kenan gains far more screen time than Ham, Shem and Japheth. Just as Aronofsky used the fictional Ila to pose his questions, so Jordan employs Kenan for the same purpose. When Kenan fatally writes off the deluge as just another storm, choosing to stay with his girlfriend instead you can sense Jordan’s dilemma. If atheism is idiotic, a more traditional take on the Noah story is no less troubling. The sin which has ruined the world need only be “wanting” rather than being “content”. Kenan might be sleeping with his girlfriend and enjoying the odd puff of a pipe, but his behaviour hardly seems to merit his extinction.

    Certainly, the strain of atheism Noah and his family encounters is rather anachronistic. Its followers pour scorn on the idea of an old man in the sky with a white beard millennia before the greeks would first picture Zeus in such a fashion. They argue that they “have science” and that the "universe created itself". Surely they argue if the world is designed then "Who designed the designer?"

    Elsewhere however these kind of modern-sounding objections feel much more realistic, most notably when first Noah’s wife and then his sons respond to his plan to escape the world’s watery demise. “Won't they all eat each other?” asks Mrs Noah (played wonderfully by Joanne Whalley). “Can’t we just escape to higher ground?” suggests one of his sons.

    It’s these interactions which feel the most natural and are, for me, the the strongest part of the film, whereas the earlier scenes had felt a little too stereotypical. Noah and his godly family are white: the non-white characters are the sinners who will drown. The women either deny sex to their husbands, or are too frigid (and I would estimate that the length of time discussing sex is far greater than the time The Noahs ultimately spend afloat).

    Thankfully this seems to change once a “messenger” appears from God and instructs Noah to expand his farming-come-boat-building business (making a line drawing in the sand as if Noah was unsure what a boat looked like). It becomes a spot Noah returns to as the story progresses, the rains seem delayed and even his faith starts to waiver. The messenger however does not return until the very end of the film, and even then only to pose the question "Will Man learn his lesson?”

    Gradually, though, people start to come around. First Noah’s wife, then his sons and daughters in law. Whilst Noah’s preaching in the city appeared, initially, not to have gained any new converts to his cause, later on a handful of followers turn up. And then, at last, the animals appear, and, just as Noah’s wife had predicted, the family end up having to “make a dash for it when it starts raining."

    The animals appearance is one of the films boldest and best choices and allows the films focus to remain on the human drama at the heart of the story. It also allows it to capture a strange kind of fear as the doors to the ark close and suddenly a bunch of strangers realise they are trapped in a confined space with one another and bunch of equally frightened animals.

    If the ending is rather twee, it’s perhaps because Jordan didn’t want to include it at all. Like the writer of the book of Hebrews Jordan’s interest is more in Noah as a man of faith than the more Old Testament ideas of origins and covenant. Purportedly the first draft of the script ended with very first drop of rain. Whilst that might have felt a little under-done, it’s testimony to Jordan’s writing skills that the happy ending and the token appearance of the rainbow feels a little surplus to requirements.

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    Wednesday, December 26, 2012

    The Search for Noah's Ark (2012)

    Absolutely Fabulous star and British national treasure Joanna Lumley headed out to Mount Ararat in an attempt to find Noah's boat in Sunday's ITV documentary The Search for Noah's Ark.

    Starting off in Tissington Derbyshire, before heading to Mount Ararat (in Turkey) via Istanbul. In Istanbul she "learns" that Noah is a celebrated figure in Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism: At Ararat she views the Arzap Drogue stone (rock anchor) and hears Ron Wyatt's theory that the Durupınar site is the final resting place of the Ark. Having spent time meeting the locals including those in the local museum, Lumley then meets a geologist who persuades her that the Durupınar site was simply formed by a standard geological process.

    Yet whilst Lumley is put off from her initial quest to find the ark she then decides to head to the region around Mount Judi - named in the Koran as the ark's resting place - to find if there is any evidence for the flood. She visits one of the places that claims to house Noah's remains and eventually wonders if the area flooded was actually considerably smaller than worldwide - perhaps the area between the Tigris and Euphrates.

    Lumley heads back to London next to meet with Rabbi Julia Neuberger who talks about the Noah traditions in Judaism and our lack of knowledge about the precise words used. "Was it a Raven?...sure about the names of the birds? I'm not sure". But instead of taking Neuberger's advice, Lumley goes to talk to a raven expert somewhere in the English countryside. Then it's time to meet Alan Millard in the British Museum who talks about the Gilgamesh epic and the Mesopotamian story that many suppose lies behind the story.

    After the break Lumley heads to India to uncover a Hindu version of the story even more ancient than Gilgamesh, that of Vishnu and King Manu. Having heard about the Indus region's 5000 year old trade with areas as far away as the Arabian peninsula, Lumley heads to Oman accompanied, briefly, by an audio clip of Eddie Izzard's Noah routine. When she arrives she talks to Eric Staples who enlightens her and us about the kind of wooden boats built in the time, but suggests that boats the size of the ark were unprecedented at that time and would have had to be miraculous.

    Finally Lumley meets geologist Mohammed Alkindi who finds evidence for some sort of catastrophic flood. Lumley sums up by saying that there probably is some kind of historical core to these stories, but one that has been adapted and transformed into a moral story, encouraging its audience to "be good".

    It's a rather simplified summary of the role the story plays and whilst, I suppose, I broadly agree with the programme's findings - some evidence of a localised catastrophic flood which got passed throughout the wider region - the summary seems rather undercooked. If such an event occurred the results would have been so catastrophic as to reverberate throughout the region for centuries rendering itself rife for the type of mythology we find in the Noah story. Not so much simply a prod to "be good", but a fear of the danger of the untameable natural world, the hope of a deity who can rule over it and the warning to stay on his right side to avoid similar catastrophe happening to oneself.

    The problem with the documentary, as is often the case with similar programmes is that the absolutely key information is often greatly abbreviated and given little more air time than the more trivial travel-journally type footage of, say, Lumley eating food in Istanbul and wondering if Noah had eaten a similar dish all that time ago. Lumley's opinion is apparently changed by what she hears, but the evidence which appears to persuade her is strangely absent.

    None of this is to say it's a bad programme - far from it, and given ITV's relative paucity of this kind of documentary it should be applauded for providing something rather more demanding than the X-factor and indeed giving it a fairly high profile. Lumley is a high profile TV star, and whilst clearly not an expert also refuses to revert to the cliché of feigning total ignorance about her chosen subject. At the same time as a non-expert she is able to take the audience with her.

    Secondly whilst I wish certain parts of the material could have had greater emphasis, not many aspects of the topic were entirely absent. More conservative believers might wish that more time had been given to Wyatt's theories and more literal interpretations of the Noah story, but in honesty there's not much that a documentary can really do with this kind of approach.

    So whilst not perfect, The Search for Noah's Ark is a fairly good attempt to grapple with the wide variety of specialisms that shed light on the story of Noah which is hopefully sea worthy enough to encourage ITV to be involved in similar projects in the future.

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    N.B. Richard Bartholomew has also posted a review of the programme.

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    Thursday, July 12, 2012

    First Photo from the New Noah Film

    Click on image to enlarge

    These days most of the news about Bible Films in production goes through the Facebook page, partly because so many projects start but never really finish. That said the best place to go for updates for that kind of thing now is Peter Chattaway's new blog.

    But one film looks like it really is going to happen, not least because in addition to an impressive cast, a well known director and a production company, it has also started building the ark and sending round the above shot of the work in progress. I'm guessing this means that filming hasn't started yet (although it's possible they move all the machines out of the way every so often and get a few shots of Noah making the thing.

    In case you've not picked up on the various bits of information doing the rounds of the movie papers the film is being directed by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler) based on a script he wrote with Ari Handel and which was then revised by John Logan (Gladiator). But the cast is pretty impressive. Russell Crowe is to take the lead role, Anthony Hopkins will play Methusaleh (the oldest man in the Bible who died aged 969 the same year as the flood if you go for all that stuff), Emma Watson as Ila Jennifer Connelly (presumably as the wife of one of Noah's three boys) and Jennifer Connelly as Naameh. If, as seems likely, Naameh is Noah's wife, then it seems Connelly is developing a nice line playing the wives of famous historical pioneers after playing Darwin'd wife in Creation. In fact it could be argued that Noah surely qualifies as a technological pioneer as well so if anyone is considering making a film about Isaac Newton, Connelly might be the actress for you.

    The publicity is calling this the biggest biblical epic since The Passion of the Christ. I'm interested to know what they meant by that. The budget for The Passion was only $25 million. I suspect that were you to combine what those four actors will be paid for the film it will come in at more than that. So in that sense it will be bigger. Perhaps what they mean is that they are anticipating it taking more than The Nativity Story, but not as much as The Passion of the Christ. With the cast and crew lined up this would seem to be a reasonable hope, Crowe is still a massive star, particularly in the genre in which he became a household name, but his last film in that genre Robin Hood only made back half it's $200m budget in the US, but made an additional $215m everywhere else, making a decent profit. I'd imagine the overseas take would again be quite high, but I'm not sure Noah will make as much as Robin in either market. Still time will tell.

    I'm looking forward to this film though. I've written about it several times before as well as about the various other Noah films that someone has announced were being made. In particular I hope he explores what he perceives as Noah's survivor's guilt.

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    Friday, February 18, 2011

    More on Aronofsky's Noah

    Darren Aronofsky has been taking advantage of the publicity he's been getting from Black Swan, so there have been a couple of articles recently about his plans to make a new version of the story of Noah (see my previous posts). Last week SlashFilm confirmed that not only has Aronofsky decided to make a comic book as a step to filming Noah, but also that there is also some footage on YouTube (though it says it is "private").

    Movieweb are carrying a piece called "Noah Is Dirty and Not PG Says Darren Aronofsky". I couldn't get the actual page to work, but Google has it in its cache. Their article says that the project will actually be a mini-series and that it will be sci-fi adaptation of the graphic novel. Interestingly it also cites the 1976 Sunn Pictures documentary In Search of Noah's Ark as a source of inspiration, one that I've never seen, but that I know Peter Chattaway has fond memories of.

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    Monday, November 02, 2009

    More on Noah's Ark

    Following on from Friday's post about Noah's Ark there's also an official website and blog for the film. There's not a great amount of information up there at the moment, apart from the following synopsis:
    To build an ark for all the animals, God chose Noah. To lead them to it, God chose... Gilbert?!?

    Gilbert the Groundhog loves Caroline with all his heart. That's too bad for him, because Caroline plans to marry into the upper crust of groundhog society, and Gilbert dwells in the deepest, dingiest tunnels a groundhog can dig. That is, until they start to flood!

    When a pair of very special doves warns Gilbert of the troubles to come, nobody in the burrow will listen. To get Caroline away from those groundhog snobs and on the road to safety, Gilbert tells a teeny tiny lie. Of course, lies don't stay little for long! Two-by-two, a menagerie of kooky, crazy animals begins to follow them. Day-by-day, the journey grows more perilous. Pretty soon, Gilbert finds himself leading a rowdy zoo of birds and beasts and all kinds of critters through deserts and jungles and much, much worse...

    ...all because he told a lie. Now, the storm is come. The waters are rising. All these animals want is to run wild and free, but soon there won’t be any place left to run to. Gilbert had better quit digging himself into a hole, because it takes a hero to lead his friends all the way to Noah's Ark!
    Two thoughts spring immediately to mind. Firstly, If the hero is Gilbert the Groundhog, then who is the pink hippo in the above photo (taken from the website's only image at the time of writing)? Secondly, it seems a little strange to me that this synopsis suggests that lying is good and God's plan. It could be argued that there is some kind of biblical precedent for this, for example the Jacob story, but this kind of message is likely to repel the kind of faith groups who would otherwise be those most likely to watch a film based on the Hebrew Bible.

    Meanwhile a growing number of articles have been posted at the blog. Some of these are fairly trivial such as the Dove foundation's report on the script - it praises "the theme of believing in one's self". How very original. (That's for Dove not the filmmakers / bloggers by the way)

    On the other hand there are a number of interesting discussions of the film's approach to the Bible or examines the medium of animation (such as Sculpting in Virtual Space). It's good to see this level of discussion about a film at this stage in its production, and I'd encourage them to keep it up.

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    Friday, October 30, 2009

    Rising India to Fund Noah's Ark

    There are so many films about Noah rumoured to be on the way that news about any one of them sends me scurrying thorugh my previous posts on Noah films to try and work out which is the one that is being discusses. Anyway, the latest ark story to emerge on the pages of Variety concerns the Bob Funk / Unified pictures film Noah's Ark. The story simply says that US based company Rising India will be funding it to the tune of $40 million. Whether this is on top of or instead of previous financiers remains to be seen. In the current financial climate though it's encouraging to see companies still financing these movies as I suspect that many of the films I have previously mentioned as being in production will never get made as a result of it.

    Here's the latest list anyway:
  • Not the End of the World - Illuminated Films
  • Unnamed Noah Film - Darren Aronofsky
  • Sold Out! - Uri Paster
  • Aardvark Art's Ark - Warner Bros. / Casey Affleck (above)
  • The Flood - Promenade Pictures' sequel to The Ten Commandments (2007)
  • Rock the Boat - French animation (Gaumont)
  • Noah's Ark - Unified Pictures / Bob Funk
  • El Arca - Patagonik (Argentina)
  • The Missing Lynx - Kandor Graphics
  • Thanks to Peter Chattway for the latest addition.

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    Monday, June 15, 2009

    Noah's Ark Goes 3D

    There are numerous films about Noah rumoured to be in production, though I suspect not many of them will make it through the credit crunch. One of the more likely looking contenders is the prequel to 2007's animated The Ten Commandments, part of the Epic Stories of the Bible series from Promenade Pictures.

    Anyway, Variety has just announced that the film will be a "stereoscopic 3-D toon" to be made by Magic Lantern. Thanks to Peter Chattaway for that piece of news. No news on a release date on this on any of these sites. Last year Promenade CEO Cindy Bond announced that it would be Easter 2009 (!) so things have obviously been somewhat delayed.

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    Friday, December 12, 2008

    More on Aronofsky's Noah Film

    There's a little more news on Darren Aronofsky's plans for his Noah film. Aronofsky purportedly finished the script back in September, he's now revealed that he's planning to release it first as a graphic novel. Aronofsky is interviewed by Rope of Silicon, and talks about the film briefly:
    RoS: Looking forward to the projects you have coming up, what is the situation with the Noah project?

    DA: We have a script actually, it is a script but there is more work to do. We’re actually going to do a graphic novel of it right now, we’re just starting it, and we’re hiring a writer.

    RoS: And are you shopping the script around to studios and actors…?

    DA: There is an actor attached, but I’m not going to say who, but he’s a big movie star.

    RoS: Steve Carell… [joking]

    DA: [With a smile] Yeah, exactly… Eventually we’ll set it up, but we’re just figuring it out. It’s a very difficult film to get made and we’re slowly working on it to get it put together.
    I wonder if part of the thinking behind the graphic novel idea is its similarity to storyboarding? And, of course, it's also a cheap way to test out the market for such a film, whilst simultaneously building that market up.

    The September interview with /film is also contains slightly odd quotation:
    It's the end of the world and it's the second most famous ship after the Titanic... I think it's really timely because it's about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what's going on on this planet. So I think it's got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist. He's a really interesting character.
    Second most famous?

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    Tuesday, November 11, 2008

    Noah Films Sail into Difficult Waters

    There's been a lot of talk about Noah films round here recently, but as the numbers of movies based on the story of the ark got higher and higher, so it became more and more inevitable that some of them would begin to falter. I'm surprised, though, that one of the apparent strugglers is Gaumont's Rock the Boat. I say "apparent" because whilst a recent Variety article suggested Rock the Boat had been delayed because of financial difficulties, they were keen to stress it was based on "rumours". There's little info at the Gaumont website, other than a brief index page and the image I found last time I visited the site seems to have been replaced by the one above.

    Secondly, FilmChat pieces together the evidence from two contrasting stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter regarding The Flood (Promenade Pictures). It appears that Promenade's president and COO, Cindy Bond, has formed another production company called Mission Pictures, so that both companies will be producing this film. I also note that both publications are now calling this film Noah's Ark: The New Beginning - a possibility raised during FilmChat's interview with Bond back in February.

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    Wednesday, November 05, 2008

    Who Built the Ark? Noah, Noah, Noah, Noah, Noah, Noah, Noah...

    Plans for yet another Noah film have been announced by Illuminated Films (see the "News" section). This time it's Geraldine McCaughrean's Whitbread award-winning novel "Not the End of the World".

    It sounds like this one might be a little more controversial than most of the other eight Noah films that are currently in production. The book's synopsis explains how the story is told through the eyes of Noah's fictional daughter, Timna who at one point "watches on in horror as her friends and neighbours are washed, indeed sometimes pushed, away to their deaths". She also somehow sets "in motion a chain of events that will drastically affect God's plan".

    This brings the number of Noah films which have recently gone into commission to nine (not counting Polish film Ark, or flms like The Year One, and The God Complex where the Noah story is only part of the overall narrative). Here's the complete list:
  • Not the End of the World - Illuminated Films
  • Unnamed Noah Film - Darren Aronofsky
  • Sold Out! - Uri Paster
  • Aardvark Art's Ark - Warner Bros. / Casey Affleck (above)
  • The Flood - Promenade Pictures' sequel to The Ten Commandments (2007)
  • Rock the Boat - French animation (Gaumont)
  • Noah's Ark - Unified Pictures / Bob Funk
  • El Arca - Patagonik (Argentina)
  • The Missing Lynx - Kandor Graphics
  • Thanks to Peter Chattway for the latest addition.

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    Monday, September 15, 2008

    Noah Films Still Flooding In

    Peter Chattaway links to the Jerusalem Post's article about Israeli director Uri Paster (King of Beggars). In it they discuss his move to Hollywood and his first project Sold Out! - a contemporary musical on the story of Noah:
    Noah is presented as history's first stage director, and he puts the animals through auditions before they are assigned places on the ark, or rejected.

    The cast of characters gives new meaning to the word multiethnic, reflecting the roles of Noah's three sons - Shem, Ham and Japheth - as the forefathers of all mankind. And mankind, in this case, includes an Algerian musician, a Reform rabbi, a black rapper, a hassidic tenor, a Hungarian stripper, a Chinese opera singer, a French pop vocalist, Jewish kids and, for good measure, a bisexual producer. Everyone, though, speaks English. The ark itself becomes the setting for a Broadway show, with Noah's wife as the producer.
    By my count this is the eighth film about Noah to go into production in recent years (not counting last year's Evan Almighty which has already been released). Back at the end of July FilmChat also carried the story that Warner Bros. were working on an animated film about Noah's Ark along with Casey Affleck (pictured above in Vanity Fair's re-shot still from Hitchcock's Lifeboat. According to The Hollywood Reporter, that film, Aardvark Art, is about "a group of animals who are stranded when they are not chosen to go on Noah's Ark".

    Here's the complete list of all eight:
  • Unnamed Noah Film - Darren Aronofsky
  • Sold Out! - Uri Paster (above)
  • Aardvark Art - Warner Bros. / Casey Affleck (above)
  • The Flood - Promenade Pictures' sequel to The Ten Commandments (2007)
  • Rock the Boat - French animation (Gaumont)
  • Noah's Ark - Unified Pictures / Bob Funk
  • El Arca - Patagonik (Argentina)
  • The Missing Lynx - Kandor Graphics
  • As well as omitting Evan Almighty, I've also excluded the somewhat tangential Polish film Ark which played in Vancouver amongst other places at the end of last year.

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    Saturday, September 13, 2008

    More on Darren Aronofsky's Noah

    /film posted their interview Darren Aronofsky yesterday, and towards the end of their time together they asked him about his Noah project that I discussed back in May last year. Whilst his answer isn't quite as interesting as it was in his previous interview in The Guardian it's nice to heard he's still passionate about the project. Here's what he had to say:
    Peter Sciretta: Who wrote it?
    Darren Aronofsky: I wrote it. Me and Ari Handel, the guy who worked on the Fountain. It’s a great script and it’s HUGE. And we’re starting to feel out talent. And then we’ll probably try and set it up…
    Peter Sciretta: So this isn’t something you can make for six million dollars?
    Darren Aronofsky: No, this is big. I mean, Look… It’s the end of the world and it’s the second most famous ship after the Titanic. So I’m not sure why any studio won’t want to make it.
    Peter Sciretta: You would hope so.?
    Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, I would hope so. It’s a really cool project and I think it’s really timely because it’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist. He’s a really interesting character. Hopefully they’ll let me make it.
    That part of the interview has apparently gained such a lot of interest that Sciretta posted a follow-up piece just on Aronofsky's Noah in which he adds this to what we already know:
    The idea originated ten years ago, even before Pi, when Aronofsky saw a museum exhibit. But the director’s fascination with Noah’s Ark began when he was only 13-years-old. Aronofsky won a United Nations poetry competition at his Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn school. The poem was about the end of the world as seen through the eyes of Noah. When Brad Pitt abruptly left The Fountain just weeks before principal photography, Aronofsky took some time off and began to develop a variety of different projects, one of them being the Noah screenplay.
    Obviously I'll be reporting on this one as it (hopefully) progresses. Meanwhile, you can read all of the posts I've made on films about Noah here. Incidentally the image above is from Jacopo Bassano's 1574 painting "Noah's Sacrifice" which seems kind of fitting given Aronofsky's earlier comments about Noah's "survivor's guilt".

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    Tuesday, July 29, 2008

    Mark Pirro on The God Complex

    Following on from Friday's post on The God Complex I've been in contact with the film's director Mark Pirro. The conversation has been fairly interesting and he kindly agreed to let me post some of it up here.

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    Page: How far through production are you and how do your films tend to get released?
    Pirro: We have been shooting this for almost a year. We plan on a 2009 release. This is my 8th feature film and they usually go directly to cable or DVD in the U.S. and sometimes go theatrical overseas. Every film has a different release pattern. Sometimes I license them to a distributor, other times I self-distribute. We live in an internet age and distribution is not as big a deal these days. Our last film played midnights in a theatre in Hollywood before going on to DVD sales.

    Page: Are you aware of The Real Old Testament? I guess they have a similar approach to you, although they managed to get Ted from Scrubs
    Pirro: I hadn't heard of The Real Old Testament, although I am aware of Harold Ramis' upcoming film, Year One. I guess this will be the era of religious parodies.

    Page: I’ve mentioned Year One a few times, but I’m not sure it will really deliver. I suspect it’s probably too mainstream to take too many risks, and, for me, that tends to be where things get interesting.
    Pirro: My concern about "Year One," is that it is produced by Judd Apatow, who has made 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, etc. He's not afraid to push the envelope when it comes to aggressive humor. Neither are we. Although I know he won't take his comedy as far out as we are, but I think his film will be more cutting edge than most of mainstream America is used to. And since we're both using the bible as our original source material, I know some of our obvious jokes, character flaws, and impossible situations will cross paths (I was a little nervous about Evan Almighty for the same reasons). Unfortunately, that's the film business.Page:I’ve not watched many (if any) of Apatow’s movies, but from what I’ve heard whilst they tend to push things in certain areas, their values are also marked by a certain conservatism, e.g. Christianity Today noted that Knocked Up was "crass" but also considered it "pro-life".
    Pirro: Like everything else in Christianity, it's completely subject to interpretation. There is an 'anti-life' bias in the film as well. It just depends on who's watching it what what they bring to the table. Same thing with 40 Year Old Virgin. I believe Apatow, like myself, is the kind of filmmaker that likes to entertain, without necessarily giving messages. If people take away a certain message, that's fine, but I don't believe that's the initial intent of the filmmaker.

    Page: My (hugely uninformed) hunch is that Year One will have its gross out factor, but won’t actually do much to challenge the morality in the original stories.
    Pirro: If Apatow, like Harold Ramis - the director - think the way I believe they do, this will be a no holes barred outright satire. I know that our film's segments will cross paths. There are obvious crossovers with Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the ark and there's only so much 'original' humor one can pull from the mythology without being redundant. My fear is exactly 'how much' of the humor will be similar? For that, we'll just have to wait and see. At least I don't think they'll be touching the Jesus story, so we may have that over them.
    Page: Your picture of dead animals and people after the flood (above) challenges and subverts the idea that these stories are about a God of love.
    Pirro: Well, basically we take the more or less better known stories in the Bible and relay them with a more logical and satirical approach. We analyze the stories with what I call the 'square circle' syndrome. A square circle is an impossibility as defined by what constitutes a square and what constitutes a circle. One can't be the other. The god of our movie falls into that category (as one might argue is also true with the Biblical God). A being that knows everything can not be angered, surprised, vengeful, maniacal, jealous or imperfect. Those are all human traits. The God of the Bible is all that and so is the god of our movie. So in our film, our god - who is angry, vengeful, maniacal, jealous and imperfect - always tries to get things right to impress his girlfriend, but through the course of events and not very well thought out plans, things always go awry. He is always arguing with his girlfriend about how he knows all, and she argues back that if he knows all, he would have known that the first go around (before Noah) would have been a failure. He would have known that Adam and Eve would disobey him. He would have known that Abraham would be willing to sacrifice his son. His reply to her is, "Hey, don't question me." I'm god, I know all. She then socks him in the mouth and says, "Why didn't you duck?" Another point in the film she (being the voice of reason) asks why he lets people he loves suffer? He replies, "I'm God, it's what I do."
    ===========
    I think that gives a fairly good idea of how this film will pan out. I imagine that many would find this offensive were they to somehow stumble across it, but I'd also hope that it will challenge others to re-think their approach to the Old Testament Stories. I don't subscribe to the view that the brutality of these stories discounts the possibility of a loving God. However, I do think that until you've been realised just how horrific they are in places you've never really read them and thus are unlikely to have truly considered precisely how God reveals himself through them. It would be nice if interpreting the Bible was as simple as "God said it. I believe it. That settles it", but if we truly believe in a God of love then, in Pirro's words, such a simple approach just gives us a 'square circle'.

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    Friday, July 25, 2008

    The God Complex

    I just came across the website for The God Complex - an irreverent comedy that "takes the silliest stories from the Bible and makes them...well...just a little sillier". Although it's still in production there are a number of stills and several clips available to view. If you're bothered by bad language then these probably aren't the clips for you.

    It looks like the film mainly focusses on Genesis, though it also promises footage from today "where Jesus walks among us disguised as a mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper", and whilst it prides itself on being low budget there's at least one nifty special effect. All in all it looks like it will have a lot in common with The Real Old Testament.

    I'm going to contact the filmmakers to see if I can get more information, and I'll report back if so.

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    Friday, November 02, 2007

    Ark (Poland 2007)

    Last month I tried to compile a list of films about Noah, which quickly became monstrous, so I never got around to completing the list and posting it up (although I might do one day). One of the films on the 'list' that did catch my eye was the polish film The Ark by Grzegorz Jonkajtys and Marcin Kobylecki. Here's the official website's synopsis:
    An unknown virus has destroyed almost the entire human population.

    Oblivious to the true nature of the disease, the only remaining survivors escape to the sea. In great ships they set off in search of uninhabited land. So begins the exodus, led by one man...
    It just so happens that it's due to play in Vancouver on the 7th November, or at least so claims Ron Reed who has the following blurb taken from the lucky cinema's mail out:
    The Ark: inspiration, experimentation and production
    with Grzegorz Jonkajtys, Director & Lead Animator and Marcin Kobylecki, Producer
    Nov 7, 7:30 - Tickets are $15 in advance, $20/$15 non-members/members at the door.

    Please join us for this special evening with the creators of The Ark, this year’s winner of the Best of Show from SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theater program. The presenters will talk about their inspiration, concept development and creative influences, then go into a breakdown of production on this 8 minute film that combines 3D computer graphics with practical sets.

    Grzegorz Jonkajtys
    Animation Artist, Director. Graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He received an honourable mention from the dean of the Academy. His debut short animated film entitled Mantis (2001) gained widespread acclaim winning numerous prizes at Polish as well as international film festivals. For many years now he has been working in an American company, CafeFX. It specializes in special effects for big Hollywood productions. He took part in creating special effects to such films as The League of Gentlemen, Gothika, Hellboy, Sin City or (sic.) Pan's Labyrinth. At the moment Grzegorz Jonkajtys has completed work on his second animated film entitled Ark.

    Marcin Kobylecki
    Executive Producer at Platige Image the biggest CG animation and special effects studio in Poland. He is the Executive Producer of the short films The Cathedral, Fallen Art.

    If you would like to pick up your online order early, the Vancity Theatre box office will be open for will call Fri Nov 2 - Mon Nov 5, 7:15pm-8:30pm.
    Amongst the features available from the official website are two trailers and a gallery.

    There are also numerous articles on the pair behind this in various animation journals such as FX Guide and the CG Society of Digital Artists.

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