Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Haus

Here's an article I wrote several months back on the legendary special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, on his passing.

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MASTER OF THE HAUS

RAY HARRYHAUSEN’S SPECIAL EFFECTS LEGACY

By Jedd Jong 13/5/13

We hear the term “escapism” used a lot to describe a good time at the movies. There are certain genres audiences love for their ability to whisk us away from the mundane for two hours or so. Genres like fantasy, adventure and science-fiction. And there’s an undeniable mass appeal to movies that lead to collective jaw-dropping and gasps of “how did they do that?!”

One of the pioneers of the art of making moviegoers drop their jaws and gasp “how did they do that?!” was special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen was responsible for creating some of the most iconic beasts, critters and magical beings to ever stomp and slither their way across the silver screen. The swordfighting skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts? The six-armed scimitar-wielding Kali statue from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad? The fast-growing Ymir that crushed Rome beneath its reptilian feet in 20 Million Miles to Earth? All lovingly crafted stop-motion puppets and the handiwork of Ray Harryhausen.

But isn’t all this quaint and old-fashioned? Hasn’t computer-generated imagery long since usurped jerky puppets as the go-to method for creating movie magic? Read on, for you just might be surprised at the far-reaching effect the work that Harryhausen did has on some of the most prolific and well-regarded filmmakers today.

THE MOTHER GOOSE STORIES (1946)

THE STORY OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (1950)

THE STORY OF HANSEL AND GRETEL (1951)

THE STORY OF RAPUNZEL (1952)

THE STORY OF KING MIDAS (1953)

Before exploring the realm of fearsome mythological creatures and lumbering dinosaurs, Harryhausen’s earliest professional work was slightly cuddlier. “The Fairytales were what I really call my ‘teething rings’,” he recalled. His father Fred helped machine the metal armatures for the puppets and his mother Martha crafted the clothes said puppets would wear.

The Impact:

Nick Park, animator and creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, says the Mother Goose stories were his first exposure to Harryhausen’s work and he went on to become a lifelong fan. “I always considered Ray Harryhausen’s work so fine that it was way out of my league,” the animator graciously wrote in his tribute to Harryhausen.

MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949)

If Harryhausen is considered the grandfather of stop-frame animation, then Willis O’Brien could be considered the great-grandfather. O’Brien was responsible for realizing the titular character in the 1933 classic King Kong. Harryhausen cites King Kong as the film that got him really interested in pursuing a career in the industry, and he got to work alongside Willis O’Brien as his assistant on a slightly different giant gorilla film, Mighty Joe Young.

Harryhausen had a particularly healthy method when animating Joe Young: “I thought I’d get in the mood by eating celery and carrots for my tea break so I’d feel like a gorilla!”

The Impact:

“I think that’s some of his best stuff because the personality in Joe Young is amazing!” said John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London. “And the way he moves, he does move like a gorilla whereas King Kong doesn’t move like a gorilla at all.”

Mighty Joe Young was remade in 1998, this version starring Charlize Theron.

THE BEAST FROM 20, 000 FATHOMS (1953)

Harryhausen’s good friend and fellow “Ray”, science fiction author Ray Bradbury, said “Ray Harryhausen and I showed up at the same time, and he said ‘well, maybe someday, you’ll write a screenplay for me and I’ll do dinosaurs for you,’ and I said ‘well, I’m gonna pray to God for that’.” The Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms, based on a short story by Bradbury, was the eventual result.

The titular Beast, a “Rhedosaurus”, was a fictional dinosaur devised by Harryhausen, the writers and producers of the film. In order to complete the film economically, Harryhausen devised a revolutionary rear projection method that would allow him to superimpose his stop-motion animation on the live-action photography – a precursor of sorts to digital compositing.

The Impact:

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when one hears “giant lizard rampaging about a big city”? That thing was inspired by The Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms.

““Gojira is a direct result of Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms! Exactly! I think Toho (studios) said ‘we’ll make one of those!’” John Landis declared.

The Japanese filmmakers took a different approach in creating their monster, though. As Harryhausen himself put it, “(Gojira) was a man in a suit stomping around on miniature sets!”

IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1953)

Producer Charles H. Schneer wanted to create a monster movie about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. Schneer and Harryhausen had a hard time getting the City Fathers to cooperate, as they felt that seeing an octopus bring down the Golden Gate Bridge would shake the confidence of moviegoers. Harryhausen recounted the ‘guerrilla tactics’ they used in the making of the film. “We had to do things from devious means. We put a camera in the back of a bakery truck and went back and forth on the bridge to get projection plates, secretly”.

Due to budget constraints, the octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea only had six tentacles. Harryhausen had to animate it in such a way as to hide this shortcoming. He apparently liked referring to his creation as the “sextopus” (feel free to insert your own adult anime reference here).

The Impact:

The Kraken in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was given six tentacles as a reference to the octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea. Davy Jones was also designed to emulate the “in-your-face” feel of Harryhausen’s creature animation.

Steve Johnson, animatronics and prosthetics artist and special effects supervisor on Spider-Man 2 noted “I think it’s pretty obvious that Sam Raimi is a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen if you take a look at the work in Spider-Man 2 – Doctor Octopus.” The way Doc Ock’s robot arms moved and behaved gave them a personality not unlike that displayed by some of Harryhausen’s creatures.

And from another superhero film sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the ‘Forest Elemental’.

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1953)

The 50s were arguably the height of UFO mania, and Hollywood was quick to capitalize on it and stoke the fires. Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM, Dennis Muren, said “there were a lot of movies made in the 50s with flying saucers that were pretty dull to look at but Ray gave them personality and life and you were just enthralled as a kid looking at them.”

Harryhausen found it a challenge to give the suggestion of an alien intelligence within the metallic discs – without ever showing what exactly was inside. The flying saucers were machined with the help of Ray’s father Fred, and Ray invented a geared aerial bracing system that allowed him to suspend the flying saucers at an angle.

Harryhausen happily declared, “I knocked over the Washington monument long before Tim Burton did!”

The Impact:

Mars Attacks! , of course!

Independence Day went a tiny bit larger with its monument-destroying flying saucer.

20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)

In this film, an alien beast from the planet Venus crashes on earth off the Sicilian coast – he starts out tiny, but very soon he’s fighting elephants and rampaging through Rome. The monster was to have originally laid waste to Chicago, but Harryhausen “changed it to Rome because (he) wanted a trip to Europe”.

“I felt you could get much more emotion out of a humanoid type of figure than with an animal type of figure,” Harryhausen said of the decision to give the Venusian Ymir a humanoid torso.

The Impact:

“The Ymir is probably one of the best black-and-white monsters that he’s ever created, particularly in the early stages when it’s small…(with) all the humanoid gestures that make these monsters so personable and so much more appealing,” said Joe Dante, director of films such as Piranha and Gremlins.  “The design of the creature that we have in Piranha is a little bit like an Ymir,” he pointed out. “In Piranha, there was no stop-motion monster written into the script. The stop-motion monster was in the movie simply because Jon Davison, the producer, and I liked stop-motion. Any kind of stop-motion in my movies is a tribute to Ray Harryhausen or Willis O’Brien.”

Vicenzo Natali, director of the sci-fi horror film Splice, also remarked on Harryhausen’s ability to make his creatures likeable to a degree. “You can’t make a creature film without thinking of Ray Harryhausen because he created creatures that were so sympathetic and let’s face it, he made some of the greatest monster movies of all time.”

THE 7^th VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)

The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad marked Harryhausen’s first foray into the realm of period fantasy in which he would create some of his best-remembered work. Harryhausen said “I destroyed New York with the Beast, I destroyed San Francisco with the octopus, I destroyed Rome with the Ymir and I destroyed Washington with the flying saucers, and that got rather tedious so I was looking for a new avenue in which to use stop-motion animation, and I latched upon Sinbad.”

Sinbad was a risk for the studio because a then-recent film on the same subject, Howard Hughes’ Son of Sinbad, was a flop. “Oh, costume pictures are dead,” studio executives would say. Harryhausen was inspired by the likes of the Arabian Nights films from the 40s and The Thief of Baghdad.

For The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad, Harryhausen would produce what went on to be among the best-loved of his creations. “I get more fan mail coming in about the Cyclops I think than any other creature,” he said. “I designed the Cyclops very carefully because I didn’t want people to think it was a man in a suit, so I put goat legs on like a satyr in ancient mythology. I gave him an appearance of three fingers so no one could assume that there was a man inside the Cyclops, and I think it worked out very well.”

The Impact:

“It’s so inspiring that it made you want to make movies,” Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter said. The Pixar film Monsters, Inc. included a shoutout or two in the form of the Cyclopean characters Mike and Celia who go to eat at the fancy restaurant named ‘Harryhausen’s’.

“Without The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, you would never have Lord of the Rings,” Vicenzo Natali commented. He might’ve been right: take a look at this guy Peter Jackson brought along to the Return of the King set from a short film he had made at age 15, called The Valley:

“When I was 12, 13 years old and other kids were getting interested in cars, sport and girls, I used to love monsters and I particularly loved Ray’s films,” Jackson said fondly of his teen years.

JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)

Based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Jason and the Argonauts is held by many as Harryhausen’s crowning achievement. “A lot of people find Jason and the Argonauts one of our best films,” Harryhausen acknowledged. “It’s my favourite because it was the most complete.”

“Some of the films are better made than others. And some of them have better scripts than others. I mean Jason and the Argonauts probably has the most literate screenplay, so it is a better movie,” John Landis remarked.

“I want to speak on behalf of all the actors that appeared in Harryhausen films,” John Cairney, who played Hylas in Jason, said. “They weren’t all monsters, they weren’t all effects – there were real live actors in there…We were trained to be classical actors. To appear at the Old Vic, that was our standard. But there was I, eating sand in Palinuro – and loved it, loved it, loved being there, being part of this titanic imagination of this man.”

But of course, the stars still were the creatures. Jason and the Argonauts boasted the seven-headed Hydra (in lieu of a more ordinary dragon) and the gigantic Bronze figure of Talos that rises from its pedestal to stomp across the beach. However, the most iconic sequence from the film probably was the skeleton fight.

The skeletons were conceptualized with rotting flesh hanging off them, but in order to avoid an X rating, Harryhausen went with the clean-cut skeletons we’re so familiar with today. The skeletons were designed with all the joints a real human skeleton would have, and it wasn’t easy putting it all together. The actors meticulously rehearsed the battle with stuntmen, and then shadow-fought against nothing with the skeletons inserted later via Harryhausen’s rear-projection method. “Sometimes I would only get about 13-15 frames a day,” Harryhausen revealed (you need 24 frames for one second of film). “It took four months to animate the sequence; it only took two weeks to shoot the live-action.”

The Impact:

Where do we even begin?

Army of Darkness

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

The Terminator

“The images of those skeletons leaped off the screen and drove straight into my DNA… I’m sure there’s a direct link between those demonic skeletons and the chrome death figure in The Terminator,” James Cameron said of the influence the Jason and the Argonauts scene had on him.

Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams

FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964)

Ray Harryhausen had always loved the works of H. G. Wells and wanted to make a film based on a Wells story. After finding that the rights to War of the Worlds and The Time Machine were unavailable, he settled on First Men in the Moon. The film was also owed a fair bit to Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and Harryhausen even owned an original business card of the pioneering filmmaker.

The Impact:

“I’m always saying to the guys I work with now in computer graphics, ‘do it like Ray Harryhausen’ or ‘why don’t you look at Ray Harryhausen and see what he did,” said Phil Tippett, creature visual effects supervisor on Starship Troopers.

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966)

Yeah, we know this film is best remembered for the fanservice Raquel Welch so lovingly provided. “Raquel Welch was cast in the picture; that was one of her first films. She never looked like a real cavewoman; she wasn’t supposed to – that wouldn’t have been very entertaining to the public. If cavewomen in prehistoric days looked like Raquel Welch, we’ve regressed today!” laughed Harryhausen. 

The film was a remake of a 1940 film starring Victor Mature and Carole Landis – for that film, lizards with fins glued to their backs stood in for dinosaurs, something Harryhausen felt looked too “phony”. The dinosaur models in the newer one were inspired by paintings and drawings done by Charles R. Knight, one of the first painters to envision what dinosaurs might’ve looked like back in the day. Harryhausen also made research trips to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In order to make the dinosaurs look less static, he would animate them with their tails swishing about as they moved.

The Impact:

“Ray Harryhausen’s work had a huge impact on us during the design of King Kong (2005). There are a lot of different ways we could possibly go with the design of the creatures and the dinosaurs, and Peter (Jackson) especially, he said he didn’t want them to be real dinosaurs as such, he wanted them to be movie dinosaurs,” said Greg Broadmoore, concept designer on King Kong. “So we were trying to evoke that era of dinosaurs from movie history and really wanted to capture that, so in that sense they were more like monsters in their characters than true animals.”

There’s also Roland Emmerich’s 10 000 B.C.

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969)

The next feature film Harryhausen worked on also dealt with dinosaurs and was about a group of cowboys who hope to stage the ultimate rodeo after capturing the “Gwangi” of the title – a vicious Allosaurus – from the valley of the title. The film is most famous for a scene in which the cowboys attempt to lasso Gwangi, a sequence that took Harryhausen well over two and a half months to complete. Unfortunately, the film was released too late and dumped on the market, with moviegoers assuming it was a Japanese production. Harryhausen has stated that it didn’t have the advertising required to give it visibility, and that perhaps it was too kitschy for audiences to swallow even then.

The Impact:

This bit where poachers try to lasso a Parasaurolophus in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1973)

Following the box office failure of Gwangi, Harryhausen decided to do a Sinbad sequel. This would be followed by Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger in 1976. The film is known for the six-armed Kali idol which comes alive to battle Sinbad and his compatriots. The Kali sequence was a vestige of the intention to use India as a filming location; the movie was eventually shot in Spain.

“I think my favourite creature from a Ray Harryhausen film would probably be from the first one I ever saw, which was The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and it was the Kali, the giant statue that comes to life,” Vicenzo Natali said. “And it was just so shocking to see so beautifully rendered and animated and I think stands the test of time. It hasn’t really aged one bit and I still find it terrifying.”

The Impact

Notice the way General Grievous extends his extra arms in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

And the Brahman statue that comes to life in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981)

The last major motion picture Ray Harryhausen worked on gave him the chance to create mythological creatures that would stand alongside the pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses – including Sir Laurence Olivier’s “I’m only doing this for the money” turn as Zeus. One of the highlights of the film is the tension-filled sequence in Medusa’s lair.

Ray Harryhausen recalled a film that portrayed Medusa by way of giving an actress a wig with rubber snakes that would bobble around as she walked. “It wouldn’t frighten a two year-old child!” He declared. “I tried to design her so that she wouldn’t have clothes, that’s why I gave her a reptilian body, because I didn’t want to animate flowing cloth. We gave her the arrow from Diana’s bow and arrow and the rattlesnake’s tail so that she could be a menace from the sound effects point of view. It became a big problem because she had 12 snakes in her hair; each snake had to be moved, the head and the tail, every frame of film, along with her body and her face and her eyes and the snake body.” He wanted to give the character green eyes, but had to make do with blue eyes that he manipulated with the eraser end of a pencil.

 The other famous creature Harryhausen made for Clash of the Titans was the Kraken – which is actually a sea monster from Norse, and not Greek, myth. Harryhausen opted for a more humanoid design, with tentacles that ended in hands. He cited French artist Gustave Doré as one of his main influences over the years - Doré was known for a dramatically-illustrated edition of the Bible.

Harryhausen found himself needing some assistance and hired animators Jim Danforth and Steve Archer – up until that time, he had done all of the animation himself. Danforth animated the bulk of the sequences involving Pegasus the winged horse, and Archer was responsible for most of the shots featuring Bubo the mechanical owl.

The Impact:

Clash of the Titans was remade in 2010. Many devotees feel that in spite of the refined look of the newer film, it just doesn’t match the heart and the charm of the original.

AND WHAT ABOUT CGI?

When asked about what led to his decision to retire, Harryhausen answered “young people have been brainwashed by television to want everything quickly, and you just can’t have an explosion every five minutes in Greek mythology, so I felt it was time to retire. I felt I had had enough.”

“Steven Spielberg, when Ray was in town, got him over to the editorial suite for Jurassic Park,” recalled Phil Tippett, animator and ‘dinosaur supervisor’ on that film. “Ray was blown away by it. He thought it was just really an amazing process.”

“I couldn’t say anything negative because it was most impressive!” Harryhausen admitted.

James Cameron said, “I think Ray would have loved to have had access to the tools that we have now for computer-generated animated characters, because…the stop-motion puppetry was a way for him to get the images that were in his head up on film, and that was the only way to do it at that time. If Ray were working right now, he’d be using the tools that we’re using right now, he wouldn’t cling to the puppetry, his imagination would require that he use the best, most fantastic techniques available.”

However, Harryhausen himself wasn’t so sure. “Well, I don’t know, it’s hard to say – it’s just another way of making films. I think I would prefer to make films with the model animation rather than CGI, today even…I would find it rather unappealing to just sit at a desk and push buttons to get a visual image up on a screen!”

Both stop-motion animation and computer-generated imagery are different ways of creating movie magic, and each has its own pros and cons. While stop-motion animation is, more often than not, not quite ‘realistic’, Harryhausen saw that as one of its charms. “There’s something that happens with a model I’ve always felt, when you use a model instead of computer-generated images, the model is strange, it gives the nightmare quality of a fantasy. If you make fantasy too real, I think it loses the quality of a nightmare, of a dream.”

The way Harryhausen made films, where it was largely just him designing, building and animating his models, just isn’t the way things work anymore. Now, there are armies upon armies of visual effects artist, each working on a small part of a scene. While it is more efficient, perhaps some of the human touch that Harryhausen gave to each frame by painstakingly manipulating the models by hand has been lost.

 “There’s a real danger of the effects not being special anymore, they’re just common,” Dennis Muren warns. It’s interesting to note that some of the big names in the digital effects business today, including Muren and Tippett, started out as stop-motion animators.

The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which seeks to educate the public on stop-motion animation and preserve the heritage of Harryhausen’s work, was set up in 1986 to ensure that Harryhausen’s contributions to film history will always be remembered. Peter Jackson’s visual effects company Weta Digital helped make a digital duplicate of one of the skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. So while the way visual effects are made may be changing, what won’t change is the tremendous effect Harryhausen’s work has had on filmmakers and film-lovers everywhere.

“His legacy of course is in good hands because it’s carried in the DNA of so many film fans,” James Cameron said. “I think all of us who are practitioners of the art of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contributions to the collective dreamscape, we would not be who we are.”

“I just want to acknowledge the fact that we wouldn’t be here today making these movies like Jurassic Park and like Avatar without Ray, the father of all we do today, in the business of science fiction, fantasy and adventure,” said Steven Spielberg. “Ray, your inspiration goes with us forever.”

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The primary source for this article was the 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, which I highly recommend. Packed with revealing interviews, footage from all the films Harryhausen has worked on and behind-the-scenes images of him creating his magic.

Roger Ebert: A Life at the Movies

As published in F*** Magazine Issue #40

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ROGER EBERT: A LIFE AT THE MOVIES

F*** remembers the film criticism icon

By Jedd Jong 5/4/13

On April 4 2013, film critic Roger Ebert passed away at age 70 after 11 years of battling cancer. Ebert was not a movie star or film director, but he is a beloved figure among moviegoers all the same. Through television shows such as At the Movies and books like his essay collections The Great Movies I, II and III, Ebert became more than a critic; his famous “two thumbs up” endorsement entering the popular culture lexicon. We’re the first to admit that movie critics may not be the most endearing personalities ever, but over the course of his four-decade long career in the field, Ebert became America’s knowledgeable, witty uncle to turn to in picking out films for a movie night. In 1975, Roger Ebert became the first movie critic to take home the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and in 2005, was the first movie critic to be honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Behind the glittering acclaim was ultimately a man with a deep love for the movies. Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942 in Urbana Illinois, to Walter and Annabel Ebert. As a high school student, Ebert took up sports writing for the local newspaper, The News-Gazette in Champaign, Illinois. However, he probably owes his writing career to being something of a passionate fanboy from the very beginning - even though he has ruffled some fanboy feathers in his time, with his negative reviews of movies like, well, Fanboys. In the days long before internet forums and newsgroups, science-fiction fanzines were the foremost avenue for lovers of the genre to discuss, analyse and enthuse and over their favourite sci-fi stories; Ebert contributing articles to several of them. Also among Ebert’s early influences was the parody magazine Mad, which frequently featured comic strip spoofs of movies that sensitized Ebert to the clichés and formulae beneath the surface of many films.

Roger Ebert was an alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he worked as a reporter for The Daily Illini. One of his very first reviews, written for the paper and on the 1960 Fellini classic La Dolce Vita (which is, coincidentally, about a journalist), opened with this sentence: “There is in La Dolce Vita a great deal to be puzzled about, and a great deal to be impressed by, and perhaps a great deal which we as Americans will never completely understand.” And thus began Ebert’s film criticism legacy.

In 1966, Ebert was hired as a general reporter and feature writer for the Chicago-Sun Times, taking on the post of film critic the next year after the departure of Eleanor Keane. 1967 also saw the publishing of Ebert’s first book Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life, a history of the first 100 years of his alma mater. Ebert dabbled in filmmaking, writing the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Ebert would further collaborate with schlockmeister Meyer on such raunchy exploitation flicks as Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens and Up! (absolutely not to be confused with the Pixar film).

What launched Roger Ebert into the public spotlight was his appearance on TV as a broadcast film critic. In 1975, Ebert and Gene Siskel, a film critic from the Chicago Tribune, teamed up for the film review show Opening Soon at a Theatre near You, created by Chicago-based PBS-affiliate station WTTW. The show was renamed Sneak Previews after two seasons. In 1982, the duo left the show to establish At the Movies, which was followed by Siskel and Ebert and the Movies, shortened to Siskel and Ebert in 1987. The pair were known for their spirited discussions and for making film appreciation accessible to the television-viewing and movie-going audience at large. It was always entertaining to watch them really get into it and argue over a film they disagreed upon, such as with Silence of the Lambs, Baby’s Day Out and Cop and A Half. The pair often traded brickbats on talk shows and made a memorable guest appearance voicing versions of themselves in the animated sitcom The Critic.

And of course, there were the thumbs. On this method of rating the films, Ebert said “stars are relative, not absolute. Thumbs are a little more pure, because they basically say ‘yes, I recommend that you go see this movie’ or ‘no, I recommend that you don’t go see this movie’ and when you talk to a friend and ask ‘should I go see this movie’, they say ‘yes’ and they say ‘no’.” The thinking was that a more binary approach that the usual “star” or “points” system would have more clarity. The duo trademarked the phrase “two thumbs up” (though not their actual thumbs, as has been rumoured) in 1989, and it became a sought-after endorsement proudly displayed on movie posters and DVD covers.

Gene Siskel died from complications of a brain tumour surgery in 1999, and Ebert dedicated an entire episode of the show to his late co-host. “People always asked if we really hated each other,” Ebert said in the episode. “One thing I know for sure is that we didn’t.” *Sniff*. Ebert knew the show had to go on, and searched for someone to replace Siskel by his side, eventually settling on Chicago Sun-Times columnist and film critic Richard Roeper. While Roeper was younger and more energetic, fully recapturing the chemistry that Ebert and Siskel had together would prove elusive.  

Unfortunately, Ebert would face tragedy again in the form of his ill health. In 2002, he was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer and in 2006 had part of his jaw bone removed. He nearly died from a burst carotid artery and was eventually no longer able to speak, eat or drink. While he was unable to further co-host At the Movies (which cycled through many potential replacement critics), Ebert became active online and continued to write print reviews for the Chicago-Sun Times. He communicated via a computerised voice system and in 2011 proposed the “Ebert test”, which would gauge how closely a synthetic voice could mimic the real thing by seeing if the voice could tell a joke and make someone laugh.

Roger Ebert’s opinions were divisive at times, as should be expected of a film critic of his stature. He gave A Few Good Men a thumbs down rating, expressing disappointment in its predictability and its ending. Ebert was also one of the very few who praised Speed 2: Cruise Control, widely regarded as one of the worst films of all time. His controversial stance that video games are not, and probably will never be for a long time, “art” made many gamers consider him a snob. He also earned the ire of fans of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by suggesting that by liking the film, they were not “sufficiently evolved”.

In the introduction to his book The Great Movies III, Ebert wrote “I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: ‘A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.’ I do. That is not ego. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than forty years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy.”

He also famously told Rob Schneider, star of Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo, “your movie sucks.” Imagine Ebert’s surprise then, when he was ill and a bouquet of flowers accompanied by a handwritten note wishing him a speedy recovery arrived. It was a gift from the actor, signed “Your Least Favourite Movie Star, Rob Schneider”. Touched, Ebert wrote “although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man”.

From the outpouring of sympathy following Ebert’s death, it is clear that in spite of the saying “nobody likes a critic”, he was an influential figure who meant a lot to those who make movies, those who watch movies, and those who love movies.

Director Steven Spielberg said in a statement, "Roger loved movies. They were his life. His reviews went far deeper than simply thumbs up or thumbs down. He wrote with passion through a real knowledge of film and film history, and in doing so, helped many movies find their audiences.”

Director Christopher Nolan said “Roger really to me has been emblematic of a wonderful everyman approach to criticism. He never became jaded… even while bringing a very thoughtful critical eye.”

Director Martin Scorsese declared that “the death of Roger Ebert is an incalculable loss for movie culture and for film criticism. And it’s a loss for me personally…There was a professional distance between us, but then I could talk to him much more freely than I could to other critics. Really, Roger was my friend. It’s that simple.”

Even the President of the United States himself, Barack Obama, felt compelled to make a statement. "Roger was the movies. When he didn't like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical. Even amidst his own battles with cancer, Roger was as productive as he was resilient — continuing to share his passion and perspective with the world. The movies won't be the same without Roger, and our thoughts and prayers are with Chaz and the rest of the Ebert family."

Perhaps the saddest statement to read of them all was the one issued by Ebert’s widow, Chaz. "I am devastated by the loss of my love, Roger — my husband, my friend, my confidante and oh-so-brilliant partner of over 20 years. He fought a courageous fight. I've lost the love of my life and the world has lost a visionary and a creative and generous spirit who touched so many people all over the world. We had a lovely, lovely life together, more beautiful and epic than a movie. It had its highs and the lows, but was always experienced with good humour, grace and a deep abiding love for each other." 

Roger Ebert wrote his final entry on the blog “Roger Ebert’s Journal”, entitled “A Leave of Presence” (April 2 2013), explaining that he would be writing less reviews himself owing to his ill health. “What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.” He ended off the post with “So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.”

The balcony may be closed and the aisle seat may be vacated, but Ebert is indeed not going away. Filmmakers Steve James, Steven Zaillian and Martin Scorsese are at work on a bio-documentary film about the movie critic’s life. For all the things that he was – reviewer, journalist, screenwriter, fiction author, cookbook writer (see The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker) – Ebert was a bona fide cinephile, someone whose love and knowledge of the movies was infectious and influential. He has left behind a legacy of an understanding and a passion for movies, and has imbued in so many that there’s so much more to the medium than just entertainment, and that discussing and thinking about movies is a fulfilling, enjoyable endeavour.

It’s been said that “nobody ever built a monument to a critic”. Well, perhaps an exception might be made for Roger Ebert.  

Tony Scott: A Legacy of Action

As published in F*** Magazine, Singapore - Issue 32

Text:

A LEGACY OF ACTION:
Remembering Tony Scott

By Jedd Jong 21/8/12


On 19 August 2012, Hollywood and the film-going public at large lost one of its best contemporary action movie directors: Tony Scott. While many may not know his face or even his name, his films are widely held by fans as shining examples of the modern-day action thriller, movies that were exciting to watch yet not silly, throwaway pieces of junk food.  His films Top Gun, True Romance and Crimson Tide have pretty much cemented their position as classics of sorts, and some could say he is the man at least partially responsible for turning big-name stars such as Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Brad Pitt into fully-fledged action heroes. Many readers of F*** Magazine are surely lovers of these films, films that many action movie junkies have some kind of an attachment to. “Boy’s movies” that we cling to as reminders of our childhood, just like matchbox cars and model airplanes, and that followed us into adulthood with the more serious and dramatic Man on Fire, Domino and Spy Game.

Who was the man who created all these memories? Almost never seen without his trademark faded red baseball cap, Tony Scott was an adrenaline junkie in real life with a penchant for fast cars and motorbikes and who often relaxed by going rock-climbing. Anthony David Scott was born in North Shields England in 1944, the youngest of three boys. His father Colonel Francis P Scott was an officer in the Royal Engineers and his older brother was, of course, fellow director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator). Tony acted in his brother’s student film Boy and Bicycle and followed closely in his footsteps, graduating from the Royal College of Art just as Ridley did. However, Tony had originally wanted to be a painter, and it was his brother’s early success producing television commercials that sparked an interest in film. Tony wanted to make documentaries, and Ridley advised him to join his production company and promised his younger brother that he’d make enough money to get himself a Ferrari within a year, which he did. Over the next 20 years, Tony Scott directed thousands of television commercials working alongside his brother, looking after Ridley Scott Associates while its namesake was busy fostering a feature film career. On a sadder note, 1980 saw the passing of Tony and Ridley’s older brother Frank, who had succumbed to cancer.

The late 1970s and 80s saw something of an exodus of British directors who had experienced success directing television commercials over to Hollywood, including Alan Parker (Evita, Mississippi Burning), Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, Fatal Attraction), Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Revolution) and Ridley Scott himself . Many British directors who make it big in Hollywood these days are lauded, however during that time these directors were treated with a fair amount of hostility. In an interview with Cinema Blend, Tony Scott recalls the experience – “That period in the 80s was a period when I was constantly being criticized, and my press was horrible. I never read any press after The Hunger.” The Hunger was his first feature film, not an action flick like those he would become known for, but a horror film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, about a vampire couple caught in a love triangle with a researcher interested in sleep and aging science. Oh, and it was dripping with blood and sex. The critical reception was not warm; renowned film reviewer Roger Ebert panned The Hunger as “an agonizingly bad vampire movie” and it launched accusations that Tony was too focused on atmospherics and style as opposed to storytelling.

Downtrodden, Tony Scott returned to making television commercials and music videos, until he was approached by the super-producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to direct a wee little fighter plane flick called Top Gun. They liked a television commercial Tony had made for Saab, featuring a car taking on a fighter jet in a pulse-pounding race, and thought he would be the perfect fit for their film. The film made waves with its aerial dogfight sequences shot in cooperation with the US Navy, the likes of which audiences had never seen before. However, the authenticity of these scenes had its price, and famous aerobatic pilot Art Scholl tragically crashed his plane while filming a sequence and neither he nor the craft was recovered – Tony Scott dedicated the movie in his memory. Once again however, the critics were not at their kindest to Tony Scott, Ebert once again offering this remark on the film: “the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless”.

Tony Scott himself remarked, “when it came out I got slaughtered. ‘It represented everything bad that had ever been done in cinema.’ David Puttnam said that…But with the material I had, you can’t do it in a serious way — it had to be pop. I think it is the ultimate piece of Americana from 1986.” And that it was. Audiences on the other hand felt the need for speed, and rocketed the action flick towards an estimated worldwide gross of $353,816,701. The film made a star out of its leading actor Tom Cruise, and quickly took its place in popular culture, equally admired and parodied. Quentin Tarantino offered a humourous monologue during his cameo appearance in the film Sleep with Me, in which he analyses the homoerotic undertones Top Gun supposedly possesses, and the film was the primary basis for the spoof film Hot Shots! starring Charlie Sheen.

After the commercial success of Top Gun, the sky was the limit for Tony Scott and he quickly found himself in high demand as an action director. Simpson and Bruckheimer promptly hired Tony Scott to direct the second installment of their Beverly Hills Cop action-comedy series, replacing director Martin Brest from the first film. The film got mixed reviews, with Roger Ebert (him again) commenting, “What is comedy? That's a pretty basic question, I know, but Beverly Hills Cop II never thought to ask it.” Nevertheless, the box office take was once again sizable. Tony Scott ditched the comedy altogether for his next film, the romantic crime drama/thriller Revenge starring Kevin Costner, Anthony Quinn and Madeleine Stowe. Then, it was back to partnering with producers Simpson and Bruckheimer and re-teaming with Tom Cruise for the racing film Days of Thunder  (essentially “Top Gun on wheels”)– which also introduced Cruise to future-ex-wife Nicole Kidman. Next up was The Last Boy Scout, which paired Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans as a former secret service agent and an ex-football star respectively, solving the murder of the latter’s girlfriend. There was friction between Scott, and Willis and Joel Silver (who had produced the actor’s Die Hard movies), plus the film was a slight disappointment at the box office, the Christmas-time release date of a brutal action flick often cited as a reason. However, The Last Boy Scout did singlehandedly rescue Bruce Willis’ reputation after the flop Hudson Hawk, and proved popular as a video rental title and Tony Scott counts it as one of his favourite of the films in his oeuvre.

The story goes that on the set of The Last Boy Scout, Scott had been ambushed by a pesky fan who asked endless questions about, among other things, the correct use of smoke. At the end of the shoot he learnt this cinema geek was none other than Quentin Tarantino, the same guy who read homosexual subtext into Top Gun.  Tarantino then managed to get Scott to read a couple of scripts he had written, one of which became Scott’s next project: the romantic crime thriller True Romance, a sort of Bonnie and Clyde for the 90s. It starred Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette as the central couple, with actors such as Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Tom Sizemore and Brad Pitt numbering among the supporting players. This time around, the critics loved it. Roger Ebert finally gave a Tony Scott film glowing praise, writing "the energy and style of the movie are exhilarating", and then up-and-comer Tarantino got a good deal of attention for his screenplay for the film. However, the edgy, violent and somewhat nihilistic nature of the film probably alienated some audiences, and the movie failed to make back its $13 million dollar budget.

The submarine thriller Crimson Tide would be something of a landmark for Tony Scott – not only is it considered one of his best and most successful movies, it was the first time he would work with Denzel Washington, who would become a frequent collaborator. Unlike on the gloriously exuberant Top Gun, Tony Scott didn’t receive government help for Crimson Tide. “The Navy didn’t give us any cooperation on that one,” Scott recalled. “They got cold feet about the plot — you know treason on a nuclear submarine!” He even had to rely on sneaky guerilla techniques to get some exterior shots of a Trident submarine. It did pay off; this time Roger Ebert’s praise was no longer faint. "This is the rare kind of war movie that not only thrills people while they're watching it, but invites them to leave the theater actually discussing the issues," he wrote.  The star power of Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman was followed up with the star power of Robert DeNiro and Wesley Snipes in Scott’s next film, The Fan, showcasing the frightening extremes a sports fan might go to in his obsession with a sports star.

1998’s Enemy of the State saw Gene Hackman reunite with Tony Scott, alongside Will Smith. At the time, Smith was attempting to transition from a rap and TV career to becoming a big screen star, and this electrifying conspiracy techno-thriller surely helped his case. The film painted a frightening picture of a government with near-omnipotent surveillance abilities, able to trap and frame a man for a crime he didn’t commit. It also allowed Hackman, as a retired NSA agent who aids Smith’s character, to reference his earlier leading part in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, in which he played a similar if more sinister role. This was a film that was on the cutting edge at the time it was released, and actually does not feel dated when viewed now, almost 15 years later. Scott’s first movie of the new millennium was 2001’s Spy Game, an espionage thriller that also had an older, more established silver screen veteran paired with a younger, sexier action star – in the form of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. Singapore’s own Adrian Pang also had a minor role in the film.

2004’s Man on Fire was the second Tony Scott-Denzel Washington joint effort Man on Fire, based on a novel of the same name (there was an earlier film adaptation in 1987, and then a Bollywood remake in 2005). In it, Washington portrayed an ex-CIA agent-turned bodyguard who goes to great lengths to rescue his 9-year-old charge (played by Dakota Fanning) when she is kidnapped. Location filming in Mexico City proved to be as dangerous and exciting as the situations depicted in the film, but Scott took it in his stride.  “But I love the adventure and excitement,” he said offhandedly. “I mean, we had four bulletproof cars stolen. We had kids turning up shirtless at 3am on crystal meth carrying Uzis. We just said, ‘F*** it — take the cars.’”

Tony Scott’s next film was something a little different – a biopic of sorts, based on the life of model/socialite-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey. This being Tony Scott and the subject being a tough-as-nails chick, it was also an action film. The film starred Keira Knightley in the title role, chopping off her hair and donning a bulletproof vest and ammo bandoliers. Tony Scott explained what drew him to the project: “I took it on because I’m always inspired by extraordinary people. I grew up in art school in the north of England and my life has been surrounded by life’s casualties... even when I was a teenager at art school I was attracted to those darker characters. She (Domino) was definitely that. Heads you live, tails you die. That was her motto.” Critics tore it to pieces though, most weren’t fans of the combination of heady, stylishly gritty camerawork and over-embellished storytelling.

Tony Scott returned to the more familiar territory of having Denzel Washington be his leading man yet again, in techno-thriller Déjà Vu. The film also had Val “Iceman” Kilmer reteam with his Top Gun director as an FBI Special Agent who calls on Washington’s character, an ATF Agent, to investigate a mysterious ferry bombing. It combined a domestic terrorism-based mystery with high-concept science-fiction elements and is also notable for having Jim Caviezel, most famous for playing Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ, as a villainous Timothy McVeigh-esque home-grown extremist. Reviews were mixed and the film’s writers themselves were particularly unhappy with the end result, blaming Tony Scott for shifting the focus from their science fiction and philosophical ideas to the action scenes. Co-writer Terry Rossio stated flatly, "Tony Scott added nothing to Déjà Vu and made several hundred small mistakes and about eight or nine deadly mistakes". Rossio’s co-writer Bill Marsili was slightly more forgiving of Tony Scott, saying “while I am quite critical of the mistakes made, and while I mourn the good stuff that was cut or lost along the way, ultimately I am proud of the finished product. I hope people see it, I want them to like it.”

Tony Scott turned his attention to TV for a while, co-executive producing forensics procedural Numb3rs and legal drama The Good Wife alongside his brother Ridley, under their production company Scott Free Productions. For his penultimate film The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott had his pal Denzel Washington as the leading man once again, but this time he wasn’t the action hero, he was an out-of-shape train dispatcher who spent most of the film confined to the control room, engaging the film’s villain (played by John Travolta) over the radio. The film was similar to Man on Fire in that it was also a remake of a film based on a novel. Yes, this was an action film, but it was an action film that mostly consisted of the back-and-forth between Travolta on the train and Washington in the control room. Tony Scott explains that he found this intriguing, saying, “it was really appealing and terrifying, two guys on the phone for an hour. Travolta plays it beautifully, but it’s all from the real guy. He’s funny, he’s f***ed-up. He’s dangerous. Denzel liked it because in this he’s playing The Guy Next Door, which he’s never done in any other movie.”  Reviews were, once again, mixed, with the general consensus being that the remake was not superior to the 1974 film.

In 2010, the Scott brothers co-produced the big-screen adaptation of The A-Team, starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson and Jessica Biel. Later that year, Tony Scott’s final completed film, Unstoppable, was released. Like The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, it starred Denzel Washington and was set on a train, and like Domino, it had its basis in real life. Continuing the Tony Scott tradition of pairing up a veteran and a rookie, Chris Pine joined Washington as a young train conductor. The heft of the trains barreling towards the screen at insane speeds was something Scott wanted to capture mostly in-camera, without an over-reliance on computer-generated imagery.  “One of my strengths is putting the audience in the thick of it: in the seat of a racing car, the cockpit of a fighter plane, or the cab of a runaway train,” Scott said. “CGI doesn’t help with that…We’ve got freight trains going 80 mph, smashing into trucks, with helicopters buzzing overhead. You just can’t capture the intensity of that when you’re patching things together after the fact.”

There is no doubt that the filmmaker had many movies in him yet; at the time of his death he had multiple projects in various stages of production. Next year will see the release of the drama Out of the Furnace starring Christian Bale, which Scott was producing. Science fiction TV series The Sector and science-fiction drama Ion were also on Scott’s plate to produce. Reportedly, a sequel to Top Gun was in the works. As can be gathered from this article, Tony Scott did not receive the level of critical acclaim his brother did, nor did he ever win or get nominated for an Oscar, nor was he knighted. On the subject of his films being seen as more commercial and less meaty than Ridley’s, Scott commented “I always get criticized for style over content, unlike Ridley’s films like Alien or Blade Runner or Gladiator that go right into the classic box right away. Mine sort of hover. Maybe with time people will start saying they should be classics, but I think I’m always perceived as reaching too hard for difference, and difference doesn’t categorize you as the ‘classic’ category.”

However, ‘difference’ does get you remembered, and many of Tony’s Hollywood peers do hold him in high regard. The condolences poured in, and oft-collaborator Denzel Washington said in a statement to E! News, "Tony Scott was a great director, a genuine friend and it is unfathomable to think that he is now gone. He had a tremendous passion for life and for the art of filmmaking and was able to share this passion with all of us through his cinematic brilliance. My family sends their prayers and deepest condolences to the entire Scott family.” Ridley Scott has not issued a public statement at the time of this writing, but halted filming on his movie The Counselor in London to be with his family in L.A.

Tom Cruise, whom Tony Scott helped make the star he is today, said about his Top Gun and Days of Thunder director, "Tony was my dear friend and I will really miss him. He was a creative visionary whose mark on film is immeasurable. My deepest sorrow and thoughts are with his family at this time."

Joe Carnahan, who director the Scott-produced A-Team film, said on Twitter, “Tony Scott as a Director was Sui Generis. Tony Scott as a friend and mentor was irreplaceable. Tone, wherever you are, I love you man. RIP.”

Director Ron Howard put it sadly and laconically: "No more Tony Scott movies. Tragic day."

Tony Scott is survived by his wife Donna and his twin 12-year-old sons Frank and Max. Tony Scott also leaves behind a legacy of action, a filmography of a higher quality than he was ever given credit for.  Samuel L Jackson said on Twitter that he was “Taking a moment to reflect on Tony Scott’s life & work!”, something we hope this article achieved. The actor continued, “My sympathies to his family. Feeling the loss!”

As do we all.

RIP Tony Scott.

Solace in a Time of Tragedy: movie theater mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado

Solace In A Time Of Tragedy: The mass shooting at a movie screening in Aurora, Colorado 

By Jedd Jong Yue for F*** Magazine 

As all of you probably know by now, there was a tragic shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. All of us here at F*** want to offer our condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the shooting, and this writer would like to say a few words about this.

As a fan of movies and someone who visits the cinema often, this senseless, infuriating and saddening act of violence hit home for this writer. This was truly such an awful thing to happen, especially since it brings to mind another horrible shooting that took place in Colorado. The victims of this Aurora theatre shooting were people who just went to catch a movie and enjoy themselves, nobody should ever have to die this way. What makes this even worse is that it seemed like it was part of the show initially and that many were attending in costume, as fans often do for midnight showings of huge films, so the killer - dressed in a riot helmet and a bulletproof vest - appeared to be part of that crowd. The killer began his attack, which started with deploying a gas canister with the use of a dispersal device, during a scene in the film with shooting and explosions - it is speculated that the shooting was planned to coincide with this scene to take advantage of and disorient the movie audience.

In the wake of this tragedy, something that is inevitable will be the blaming of the film franchise for these atrocities, that this tragedy will become a soapbox for one or more views. This is not a new thing. Oliver Stone's controversial film Natural Born Killers has allegedly inspired more than a few copycat killings, and The Deer Hunter incited some to commit suicide via Russian roulette. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, films such as The Matrix and The Basketball Diaries, that featured gunmen clad in leather coats and wearing sunglasses, were brought up as possible inspirations for the killings. I am in no place to wholly dismiss any of these claims, but this writer feels that such claims are ultimately somewhat futile attempts at rationalizing essentially senseless, devastating acts of violence. 

It’s never so simple as one or more pieces of media making a reasonable person of sound mind snap and go completely over the edge. Films, music, books, video games and other forms of media can certainly influence the thinking and attitudes of those who access them, but it would be hasty and irresponsible to jump to such conclusions. James E. Holmes, the killer in this instance and currently in police custody, is believed to have acted independently, the latest in a line of "lone wolf" gunmen and terrorists who have wreaked havoc domestically. At this point, not very much is known about this person, yet it would be easy to say "watching Batman movies made him do it". Perhaps this form of rationalization, this basic and tenuous cause-and-effect reasoning seems satisfying and helps to make sense of it all - but in the long run, it's not going to help anyone by demonising any one movie or video game based on isolated incidents.

Then of course there's the whole can of worms about gun control. Now, this writer often whines about living here in Singapore, where of course it can sometimes be stifling and where rote learning and following the rules to the letter are often rewarded over creativity and going off the beaten track. However, we probably all are grateful for the degree of safety we are afforded here. Yes, one could say "guns don't kill people, people kill people", but having access to firearms certainly makes it much easier to carry out such brutal attacks. The documentary film Bowling for Columbine presents statistics that show that the rate of gun-related crimes in Canada is much lower than in the United States, despite the widespread availability of guns in Canada. Filmmaker Michael Moore postulates that it is the climate of fear in the US created by mainstream news media and the reinforcement of paranoia-fuelled stereotyping that is a contributing factor to the high number of shootings there. This writer has neither the knowledge nor the expertise to comment properly on this issue and most things Moore presents need to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but it sounds like a fairly substantiated claim. Fear is a powerful motivator and can drive people to take extreme measures.

And it most likely could just be that this was a deeply troubled and unstable individual. A person who needs help but was either not recognised as such or unable to access such help. In a newscast on this story, ABC News Senior Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas is asked by the news anchors about the possible reasons as to why a person may commit such an act. "These things happen on a regular basis in the United States, multiple shootings like this. Unfortunately, it is individuals who are sometimes unstable, sometimes they have political motivations, but often, as we saw in the Tucson shooting, it's deranged individuals with no clear sane reasons for the activity." When asked about the gun laws in Colorado, Thomas says he is unsure of the specificities, but states that the last time he checked with Federal law enforcements authorities, there were over 200 million guns in circulation in the United States – that number is actually slightly closer to 300 million. "We buy guns in this country, just like we buy other products, and that's just a fact of American life."

In the end, this writer wants to say that he left the Singapore premiere screening of The Dark Knight Rises with a sense of hope, that despite the violence and oppression depicted, individuals with courage, strength and iron resolve rose up in the face of those odds. The film made it a point to show that idealism, optimism and pure intentions do not always go unrewarded, even under the bleakest of circumstances. This writer does not think this was a film made with the intent to incite uprisings and to glamourise dangerous dissidents. I guess we can all agree on this: targeting a movie premiere attended by large masses of regular people was an act of evil, and the way in which the killer is described to carry out the attacks implies that this was not a last-minute idea and that he had tactically planned to perform this shooting in advance.

 

The director and stars of The Dark Knight Rises have come out to show their empathy and solidarity. Christopher Nolan released a statement, saying “I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime.
The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.
Nothing any of us can say could ever adequately express our feelings for the innocent victims of this appalling crime, but our thoughts are with them and their families.” Anne Hathaway, who plays Selina Kyle in the film, said "My heart aches and breaks for the lives taken and altered by this unfathomably senseless act. I am at a loss for words how to express my sorrow. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families," and on Twitter, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake) said "My most sincere sympathies go out to the families of the victims in Aurora.”

Actor Christian Bale also visited the surviving victims of the tragedy in hospital in Aurora. He did this on his own accord, not under instructions from the studio or anyone else. The actor was certainly not obligated to do this, but this was a genuine act of charity that definitely brought cheer to those recovering from the physical and mental trauma wrought by the mass shooting. This was most definitely not a publicity stunt: Bale is not one of those actors who craves the limelight; he is often awkward and uncomfortable in interviews even when the topic of discussion is his films, let alone his personal life. The media sometimes portrays Bale as a tortured and volatile artist, but this show of solidarity certainly shows that the man has class and heart to spare.
The reason why this hit so close for many of us, even on the opposite side of the world, is the ubiquity of going to the movies. A night or afternoon out at the movie theatre with friends or loved ones is an almost universal form of relaxation, entertainment and escape, and has been for a very long time. We surrender ourselves to the screen as we sit in darkness in thrall of projected images. We feel safe, but we are vulnerable – just as Nolan pointed out in his statement. However, never let this incident frighten you from going to the movies. Michael Agrusso (ItsJustSomeRandomGuy), an internet personality best known for his comedic parody videos made with action figures, said it best in a sombre and heartfelt tribute video:
“I still love movies, and comics, and superheroes. I look to them for escape, for hope, and just because they’re so much dang fun. So all I’ll say is this: this weekend, please. Enjoy a movie, or a comic book, or a comic book movie. And it’s not about how otherwise they win or anything, just do it because you enjoy it. Better yet, enjoy it with friends or loved ones, not to forget about the tragedy but to appreciate the things and people we love in life. Movies and comics offer so much by way of opening us up to worlds of imagination we never knew existed, and superheroes offer us lessons in morality, they give us hope for ourselves and all of humanity, as well as hope that we can be the heroes of our own stories, should such the occasion arise. And they empower us with the belief that each of us can make a difference. I’d like to think that these are things we all could use right about now. I don’t know how to make sense of a senseless tragedy like this, but I know how I’m going to cope with it: I’m going to the movies. Take care.”
And we at F*** Magazine hope that all of you reading this will do the same.