By Gareth Negus
My earliest political memory dates to 1979, and my parents’ moans that “that dreadful woman has got in.” The dreadful woman was, of course, Margaret Thatcher, the so-called Iron Lady, who was to dominate the next decade of British politics.
Continue reading The Iron lady
Gareth Negus creeps from behind the couch to let us know about the best and worst of FrightFest 2011
Horror is a broad church, and the FrightFest 2011 programme reflected that. 37 films, mostly British or American in origin but with a solid international selection, meant most people could reasonably expect to find something to upset or repulse them. Continue reading Assignment: Terror
by Gareth Negus and Matthew Turner
Gareth Negus
This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has taken a battering from some quarters, and a fair bit of that is justified. But to write the whole festival off as a spent force, as some have done, is premature. Yes, there were things wrong with the festival this year. Yes, it lacked a clear direction and artistic vision. But it deserves a chance to learn its lessons and start to rebuild.
Matthew Turner
What I found very frustrating is that the reports of “The Death of Edinburgh” in the press didn’t bear any resemblance to the behind-the-scenes stories I heard from almost everyone connected to the Festival. The comments under the Guardian article linked to above are very illuminating. Certainly everyone I spoke to put the blame squarely at the feet of “CEO” Gavin Miller (whose resemblance to Tom Hollander is highly amusing), though one of those same comments also points out that there’s actually a shadowy Edinburgh committee above Miller and they’re just as much to blame. Who’s on that committee? Why aren’t they taking some accountability? It’s very easy to say “learn its lessons and start to rebuild” but it sounds like there are some severe structural problems and the foundations need dynamiting first.
But let’s get to the important stuff. What about the films this year?
by Gareth Negus
2012 will see the release of a film I’ve been anticipating for over a quarter of a century. Directed by Pixar regular Andrew Stanton, and with a screenplay by Michael Chabon, John Carter of Mars is not the first attempt to film Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels – it’s not even the first to make it into production – but it does stand a chance of being the first to fully realise Burroughs’ world the way it looked in my head when I was 12.
Burroughs has always been best known for the creation of Tarzan, partly due to that character’s popularity in other media. However, few of the many films to have featured the Lord of the Jungle are particularly faithful to the tone or detail of the novels. Tarzan’s Africa is a land packed with mysterious lost cities, tribes of great apes previously unknown to science (one group of which, the Mangani, are the creatures who raise Tarzan); it bears about as much resemblance to the real Africa as it does to Wigan.
The Tarzan films generally preferred to stick to a mix of hostile natives, evil hunters and the occasional bit of alligator wrestling. (The version closest to the books was actually the cheaply animated Filmation cartoon series of the 70s.) Hugh Hudson’s 1984 Greystoke also changes things but goes to a different extreme, treating the source novel with the kind of respect usually retained for great literature. Burroughs could certainly spin a yarn, but great literature he wasn’t, nor would he claim to be.
Though I read some of the Tarzan novels as a boy, it was the adventures of John Carter, the Virginian gentleman and adventurer transported to an alien world, that really hooked me. When I was 12, the books were available in editions with colourful, exciting cover paintings by Michael Whelan that accurately reflected the contents – the Whelan cover for the first novel, “Princess of Mars” heads up this piece. That novel, originally called “Under the Moons of Mars” and published in 1912, tells of how the former Civil War soldier turned gold prospector John Carter (presented as a great uncle of Burroughs) is transported to Mars (known to its inhabitants as Barsoom). Hiding in a cave from a group of murderous Apaches who have already killed his prospecting partner, Carter is incapacitated by a strange smoke. He undergoes an out of body experience that transports him to a world he instinctively recognises as Mars, a world that ‘for [him], the fighting man, had always held the power of irresistible enchantment’.
Continue reading My Advent on Mars: Thoughts on Disney’s Upcoming John Carter Adaptation
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