OldBoy - The Octopus Eating Scene

With the news that Steven Spielberg is to remake the South Korean psychodrama, everyone is wondering whether that movie's most famous scene is about to be reproduced. Would Will Smith ever chow down on a slippery, live cephalopod?

Ah yes. The Octopus. The scene 'has become an iconic image in the minds of many Asian cinema fans,' according to Variety. It's one of the very few shots that didn't feature in the original Japanese Manga on which the film is based. When I called him up to talk about it, Park Chan-Wook revealed the lengths his actor had to go to in the search for the prefect take.

The scene unfolds as follows.

Choi's character has fought his way out of an inexplicable incarceration after fifteen grueling years of mind-games and private torment. He is now at large in the city, in front of a sushi bar where he receives a wallet of money and a mobile phone from a passer-by. He enters the bar, and sits on one of the red-upholstered bar-stools. He's wearing sinister, comedy sunglasses. 'I want to eat something alive', he intones dully to the pretty woman serving as a sushi chef.

He's given a whole octopus on a green plate. The phone rings, and it's a phone call from his tormentor. After hanging up he rips off the head of the octopus and chews on the tentacles, which sucker and writhe around his face and even creep into his nostrils. He faints face-down onto the sushi counter as the tentacles still wriggle from his lips.

'I want to say straight away that most people in Korea don't normally eat octopus of that size,' he tells me. 'But it's true we do eat it when it's still alive'. Park wanted to show the 'hatred' Choi's character felt after that mocking phone-call from his invisible tormentor, but also his desire to 'touch' after not touching a living thing for fifteen years.

'We filmed past midnight in a real Pusan restaurant called Gozen,' says Park. Pusan is a massive harbour overlooking the Sea of Japan. It's famous for its seafood, as well as its film festival.

'The props department had ordered a total of seven octopi from the fish market, via the restaurant's established contacts, and they were kept in the fish-tanks until we needed them' It was only on the seventh take that they got the final shot they wanted 'with the tentacles really moving around in a good way'.

It turns out that each retake was torture for Choi Min-shik. Despite his formidable action presence, he'ss a committed Buddhist. 'Before every take we had to do a prayer to apologize to the octopus for killing it,' recalls Park of that evening.

'It was very hard for him to kill something like that, let alone seven creatures in a row. It took him a long time to recover'.

GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON [The Review]

When Hunter S Thompson shot himself in 2005, America lost a distinctive voice. Best know as a substance-abusing anarchic sonafabitch in pursuit of the American Dream in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he was dubiously channeled by Johnny Depp, a long-standing friend, Hunter’s reputation as a pioneering skeptical journalist, star reporter of Rolling Stone, inventor of the Gonzo style, had long since drifted into obscurity.

One of the good things about this documentary by Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney is how it restores Dr Gonzo to some semblance of seriousness. He was very much more than the Ralph Steadman caricature, a sort of drug-addled holy fool. At one point in the 1970’s, at the peak of his powers, Thompson was a formidable influence on the political landscape of America.

A mixture of talking heads, home videos, TV clips, film clips, recycled documentaries all pulled together with a Johnny Depp narration (sadly only ever reading from the books and never commenting on his own experiences with the man), the talking heads in particular are impressive. It’s a slight surprise when you see Republican Pat Buchanan speaking some warmly about him, and the former president Jimmy Carter not quite bringing himself to admit that it was Hunter’s early unequivocal support for him, when he was just a not very famous governor of Georgia, that later helped him clinch the 1977 election.

This is a feelgood documentary which avoids the darker part of Thompson’s psyche. It skimps on the details of his suicide. It says nothing about his early years. No doubt through issues of space it neglects a good deal of his writing, and skimps the quarrels with his friends. So you get many sequences from an interview with Jann Wenner, co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, climaxing as he rubs a tear from his eye, but you hear nothing of his fall-outs with Thompson after 1975. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a New York media mogul should be treated with kid gloves; Graydon Carter is the producer here, after all.

History may well show that Thompson’s most important work was his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial ’72, in which he fearlessly exposed both the Washington political establishment and the journalistic cabal that supports it. Gonzo is especially good on this, while at the same time never quite getting to the heart of what Thompson believed politically; the overweening sense is that he simply hated being lied to, and whoever was in the establishment would have received his ire.

There have been several documentaries about Thompson, one of them even cannibalized here, but this is far and away the best of them. That said, those seeking a serious analysis of Thompson’s work will not find it in Gonzo. But what it lacks in seriousness it more than makes up with an enthusiastic, appealing bundle aimed at a younger generation. He may have spent his life attacking the American Dream, but in many ways, and here’s the irony, he actually lived it.

‘Politics is the art of controlling your environment’, he once wrote. He made an art out of politics, and his life became a work of art.


**** out of five


Gonzo receives its UK release on 19th December 2008

Taxi Driver: Story of the Scene

'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who do you think you're talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Ok.’

Travis Bickle is practising with his guns in front of a mirror in one of the most-quoted scenes in modern cinema. The film is Taxi Driver. The actor is Robert De Niro. One of the last scenes to be shot, the dialogue is improvised by De Niro who borrowed the ‘signature line from a stand-up comic’ according to Amy Taubin in the BFI Film Classics guide for the movie.

The exact identity of this comedian, curiously, remains unrecorded. Scorsese’s follow-up film was to be King of Comedy – his exorcism of the information that John Hinckley had become obsessed with Taxi Driver prior to his assassination attempt on Ronald Regan. Scriptwriter Paul Schrader had in fact used the case of Arthur Bremer – who had tried to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace – as a template for the Travis Bickle character.

Paul Schrader, who had only seen his first film at the age of seventeen, was an ex critic turned top-dollar screenwriter. He was a protégé of Brian de Palma, for whom he had written the semi-autobiographical Taxi Driver (drawing in fact on his LA experience of a nervous breakdown). With De Palma’s blessing (and some nice percentage points) Scorsese took over the script with De Niro in the lead. Despite De Niro’s recent Godfather II Oscar win the Hollywood establishment made clear its antipathy for the film at an early stage – the budget was hard to raise at a paltry $1.3 million.

The film’s story is simple enough. It’s a mood piece, a love-hate letter to New York in the era of 1970’s urban decay and chequered cabs. De Niro plays the alienated Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (his name a homage to Malcolm McDowell’s character in If…) who drives a taxi for a living; enraged by the spectacle of Jodie Foster as an underage child prostitute, he decides to arm himself with a small arsenal of handguns and ride to her rescue. In the famous mirror scene here he is, stripped to the waist, practising his moves. The mixture of jump-cuts, reverse angles and 180-degree swish pans make it hard to differentiate the man from his mirror image.

Accorsing to Scorsese, Bickle’s fluid moves are inspired by the filching scenes in Bresson’s Pickpocket. And the reason Bickle keeps repeating the line ‘are you talkin’ to me’? If the camera had panned down you would have seen Scorsese himself lying on the floor, mere inches from the actor, wearing headphones, mouthing to De Niro ‘say it again’ out of earshot – worried that the street-noise from bustling New York was ruining the take.

Story of the Scene: Star Wars (1977)

How did a Warner Brothers stock sound effect become an in-joke amongst movie sound editors and movie geeks after being revived for the original Star Wars? Who screamed the Wilhelm scream?

To be frank, it’s a fairly insignificant moment in Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is on the Death Star, lair of his nemesis Darth Vader. He's fighting a running battle with the white-armored Storm Troopers and now he’s come to a vertiginous drop at the end of a corridor. He's firing upon the Storm Troopers on a similar position just opposite. One Trooper falls into the abyss between them and there’s a strangulated slightly high-pitched cry.

Welcome to the Wilhelm scream, used in over 130 films since the 1950’s.

This was the moment when it became currency again, a cult item, a moment of Hollywood history and a piece of pure Hollywood kitsch.

The man who put the scream in Star Wars is Ben Burtt. During his sound design work on Star Wars, Burtt was looking through the Warners archives. He came across an almost forgotten 3-D film called Distant Drums, made in 1951.

During a scene in which some soldiers are wading through the everglades, one is savaged by a waiting alligator. This is the first ever use of the Wilhelm Scream. Why is it called the Wilhelm scream? Burtt called it that after finding a subsequent use in The Charge at Feather River (1953) where it is issued by one Private Wilhelm (played by Ralph Brooke) after being shot in the leg.

For years it was only ever heard in Warner Bros films. It can be experienced in Judy Garland’s A Star is Born amongst many others. After Burtt started using it as a leitmotif in all of his movies it became much better known. For a long while Joe Dante employed it as a favored zombie cry in his films. More recently he has abandoned its use; now everyone is in on this former industry joke, a bit of sonic badinage between special-effects geeks.

During the editing of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino called for a break when he was told all about the history of the scream - just as he was using it himself. By coincidence a TV channel was playing it that very afternoon, and Tarantino called time, crowding into a nearby room with his sound crew so he could watch Distant Drums.

So who screamed the Wilhelm scream? The most likely candidate is Sheb Wooley, most famous for the song The Purple People Eater which sold 3 million copies in 1958. Originally a bit-part actor, he played the uncredited role of Private Jessup in Distant Drums and was it seems hauled into Warner's for some post-production screaming.

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The Wrestler [The Review]

Mickey Rourke stars as the washed-up New Jersey wrestler in this Oscar-tipped low-budget movie, due for US release on 19th December.

Rourke's performance as the washed-up eighties actor playing a washed-up eighties wrestler has gripped those cultural commentators who have already seen it. Nobody ever thought this would happen – a comeback performance from Mickey Rourke many years on from his 1980’s triumphs with Barfly, Angel Heart, 9½ Weeks and Rumblefish.

Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (and gets annoyed when people use his real name), a career wrestler who is still putting on performances way past his sell-by date and having to supplement his meagre income with work heaving crates in a warehouse. He lives in a trailer park, is estranged from his daughter and seems to have few friends, even though he’s popular with his fans and his fellow wrestlers. During one event he suffers a cardiac arrest, and briefly retires, involving a humiliating stint on a deli counter in a supermarket.

Tempted by a rematch of his most famous fight back in 1986, he unwisely agrees the fight, the massive bypass scar still healing across his chest, pumping himself full if pharmaceuticals and steroids to build up bulk.

Director Darren Aronofsky is best when he plays his New York card – fancifully in Pi, but very down-to-earth in Requiem for a Dream (2000), a film whose central performance, with Ellen Burstyn as a middle-aged woman addicted to speed-filled slimming cures, won an Oscar. Here he’s in New Jersey. This is a cold and fairly uninviting place, and the hand-held camerawork accentuates the feeling of a documentary.

The environment is wintry and decaying, but the wrestling ring, somehow, always feel warm – and its understandable why Randy feels forever drawn back to it. It’s not like it was however; he was to endure many novelty, gothic acts, which involve a great deal of superficial mutilation and bleeding. The audience, these days, doesn’t want peroxided men in spangly tights and Guns and Roses on the soundtrack. They want rivers of blood.

Randy describes himself as a ‘big broken piece of meat’ and that is the feeling that Rourke gives with every inch of his performance. Indeed, the final speech that Randy gives at the end could as well describe the troubled career of Rourke himself, who at one time retired from acting to box professionally.

There’s hardly a scene where we don’t see Randy, whether he’s trying to make friendly with his angry, estranged daughter, getting picked up by a slightly suspect female fan, or in the ring with fights. There are no Rocky style training sequences. Training sequences are, to be honest, pretty boring. Instead we get more attention payed to the unexpected femininity of these super-masculine figures – the care they take with their hair being dyed, the tanning, the obsession with the body beautiful.

This isn’t Rocky, this is rock-bottom. Both Aronofsky and Rourke have pulled of a spectacular, shining comeback here – Aronofsky from the disaster of The Fountain and Rourke from the disaster of his life. This film is highly recommended.

***** stars our of five

Rogen: I Hate Getting Thin

Seth Rogen is shedding pounds off his body weight - and he hates every minute of it.

"I've been eating better and training - and hating myself for it,' admits Rogen, who is on his slim to prepare for his Green Hornet role. 'I feel like a sell out, I feel lame, I feel like a guy I would make fun of."

Rogen also wrote the screenplay for The Green Hornet, a reinvention of the old 1930's radio show that also became a Bruce Lee vehicle in the 1960's. Perhaps he should have made his Britt Reid character a little on the chunky side...

After all he's re-writing it right now.

Read more here

Howard Voices Surprise

Terrence Howard says was surprised to learn that Don Cheadle would replace him in "Iron Man 2."

"It was the surprise of a lifetime," the actor and musician told National Public Radio yesterday. "There was no explanation, (the contract) just up and vanished."

Howard said he read news reports that money was the issue, saying the contracts he signs apparently "aren't worth the paper that they're printed on sometimes."

Cheadle assumes the role of James Rhodes, a character that becomes Iron Man's sidekick War Machine in the comics, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Quantum of Solace [The Review]

After the death of girlfriend Vesper Lynd at the conclusion of Casino Royale, James Bond hunts down the shadowy group that blackmailed Lynd to betray him. Uniquely in the canon this is a follow-on mere minutes on from the former outing, a second time round for the slightly nasty Bond inaugurated by Daniel Craig. But what does Quantum of Solace actually mean?

Beginning with a car chase in Italy, the action doesn’t let up from the beginning as Bond fends of machine-gun wielding pursuing villains in their Alfa Romeos and ends up in an M16 base in Siena. There his captive reveals the existence of a sinister, clandestine organization which M (played again by Judi Dench) instructs Bond to investigate, horrified that she has no knowledge of this group or its scale of influence. M herself nearly dies as her own bodyguard springs the captive during questioning; the trail leads to Bolivia and a man called Dominic Greene (Matthieu Amalric) who is using the developing world eco-crisis to feather his criminal nest. This is a Bond film all about – water. Not diamonds, oil or uranium. Water.

There’s a long and glorious history of Bond villains but this is the first film to give them a reality check; this villain doesn’t weep blood, or sport titanium teeth, or even stroke a cat. This villain could be a Wall Street trader, a classic corporate psychopath adept at keeping ahead of the game. The Bond girl formula remains fairly unchanged – there’s Olga Kurylenko as Camille and Gemma Arterton as the tragic Agent Fields, whose death, already spread over the internet, references the ormulu assassination in Goldfinger.

There are plenty of chases, an early one through Siena during the Palio horse-racing annual event, and a pleasingly anachronistic one where Bond pilots an old cargo plane and is pursued by a propeller-driven fighter plane. Director Mark Forster doesn’t mess around with the editing – some of it is so fast it’s actually hard to follow, with edit upon edit lasting just a few seconds.

Craig, for my money, remains the best Bond since Sean Connery, and nothing about this film is going to damage that reputation. So much of the Bond films is not in its action sequences but its depiction of the international jet set high-life, and the luxurious hotels he checks into (in one amusing sequence refusing to settle to a flea pit because it suits his cover story) certainly fit the bill for vicarious pleasure. Craig brings a meaty charm to his Bond, who by this point is fairly demented from lack of sleep, grief and a desire for vengeance.

Memorable moments include a Godfather-like meeting of villains during a huge public performance of Tosca - this sequence recalls Moore-era Bond with a touch of Hannibal Lecter about it. Humor is fairly thin on the ground, but, despite the claims of Geoffrey Mcnab on The Independent, it’s there. There's a delicate balancing act between faintly preposterous situations and a genuine feeling of imminent peril. At least, post Bourne Identity, the actual hand-to-hand fighting is better to watch, and better choreographed. Bond deals in adrenaline, not life and death. Bond is never going to die.

The truth about Bond is that its machine. It's a huge, sleek vending machine. It may be famous for its product placements - its Omega watches, its high-end cars (Fords here - not very sexy), its suits and loafers, its hotels, its gold, its holiday venues. Fanciful gadgets have been phased out, mainly because you can't sell them.

The Bond franchise also a huge product placement for Pinewood, the British studio where it always takes place, and a single self-refreshing product for Eon productions who make it. Recently I met Marc Forster on a huge corporate junket; that I was supposed to interview him without seeing the film was proof to me that it wasn't ever intended to be a film. It's pure product. It's auto-merchandising taken to a level of art.

The feeling of watching Bond, unless you happen to be a psychopath, is being co-opted into a huge piece of rolling machinery with its destination always fixed and its definition of sexy corporate, glassy and ever so slightly dead.

Quantum of Solace? I’ve read up extensively on this title, and asked Forster when I met him a few weeks ago. It’s taken from a short fiction by Ian Fleming, the original writer of Bond. It means a fleeting moment of comfort. And in this Bond, the fleeting moments of comfort he gains come, without doubt, from the kills he makes.

Stars: *** Out of Five

Verdict: Bound to be overpraised, the fate of all Bond films.

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Body of Lies [The Review]

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe star as spy and spymaster respectively in this over-complicated, fast-moving tale of CIA operations in Jordan and the Middle East by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, American Gangster, Black Hawk Down). Rushed into production after the unexpected success of American Gangster, Scott is always hugely businesslike and methodical in the way he goes about making movies, and this one was no exception, impressing Leonardo DiCaprio with his organizational skills. But as a director he’s made as many bad movies as good ones; sometimes being organised just isn’t enough.

DiCaprio evokes echoes of his (rather better) performance in Blood Diamond, a movie he did directly before this one. He’s convincing as the on-the-ground Arabist perpetually frustrated at the way his remote bosses back in Washington don’t understand or don’t care about what’s happening on the ground. Filling these rather large and squashed loafers, looking as overweight and bloated as he’s ever been, directing Leo from afar with a hugely sophisticated electronic surveillance system, is Russell Crowe, phoning in one his laziest performances to date. There’s a hugely contrived romantic link too with Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (who has had some grief in her native country for appearing in this movie), who plays a nurse in Jordan for whom Leo falls.

Essentially the plot follows CIA spook Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) as he uncovers a safe-house in Jordan which he is convinced will lead him to the most-wanted terrorist in this particular deck of cards, Al-Saleem. The only way he can flush him out is to pose as a rival terrorist and wait for the man to get in touch. Much of the action is gritty and visceral, recalling Black Hawk Down with its myriad of helicopter shots and sense of heat, danger and dust. But acting kudos goes mostly to Mark Strong as the Jordanian chief of intelligence Hani; he proves more than a match for DiCaprio is some key scenes.

Based on David Ignatius 2007 novel, which is supposed to be very well researched, Ridley clearly aims to get as much to the on-the-ground truth of things. The DiCaprio torture scene is graphic. This is not for the feint-hearted, but it also refuses to be dumb lock ‘n load entertainment. On a big screen in a big cinema it looks and sounds fantastic (Scott’s sound design is always immaculate) but it does lose its way somewhat with too many characters and too many strands of the storyline. This is not a feelgood movie, and consequently an ambiguous choice for a Saturday night out.

Quinten Terrenttinowz Nu Fulm

A publicity note went out from UK publicists Freuds yesterday about Quentin Tarantino's new film.

Here's the thing. It's called Inglourious Basterds. Not Inglorious Bastards.

What is Tarantino up to? Suggestions below, please

Craig Meets Killers

Daniel Craig met actual assassins on-set of his first Bond outing, Casino Royale. How were they contacted? Who brought them to the filming? No-one seems to have an answer.

"You can see it in their (the spies') eyes," Craig told The Telegraph Magazine. "You know immediately, 'Oh, hello, he's a killer'. There's a look. These guys walk into a room and very subtly they check the perimeters for an exit. That's the sort of thing I wanted."

Chocolate [The Review]

Just picked up for distribution in the US, and opening shortly in the UK, Chocolate is the debut performance from a young Thai athlete you may well hear a lot more from in the future – in part because she’s the first truly plausible female practitioner of the martial arts since, oh, ever. Jeeja Yanin is the ingénue who kicks, swivels, elbows and whoops her way through wave upon wave of evil Thai gangsters and then feeds herself bucket-loads of M & M’s in the quiet moments.

The film Ong-Bak, by the same director Prachya Pinkaew, was the most exciting martial arts movie in well over a decade – it had genre fans salivating precisely because much of the action was real. There were few special effects, and the individuals involved in many of the fights were often putting themselves in some danger. Muay Thai, the Thai martial arts discipline which involves a great deal of kicking, is electrifying to watch; the only surprise was that it had taken so long to get onto the big screen in a viable form. The choreographer of this film discovered Yanin when she came to audition for another movie in 2004, and she went into training for two whole years while the production team wrote Chocolate for her.

She plays Zen, the daughter of a Japanese yakuza and a Thai gangster’s moll who infuriates her psychopathic boss in Bangkok and is banished to have her baby in the countryside. Zen grows up damaged, or at least with developmental issues, and shows signs of autistic behaviour throughout the film. Her greatest showdown, rather disturbingly, is with another similarly disabled young man (clearly modelled on Jet Li’s character in the atrocious Danny the Dog). Zen has aspects of the savant; she’s a brilliant mimic who absorbs martial arts technique just by watching it on TV or by gazing across the wall of her house into the martial arts school next-door.

When her mother grows sick with cancer, Zen and her sidekick do the rounds of former gangster contacts who still owe money. Zen isn’t going to take no for an answer in an ice-plant, candy warehouse and butchery-plant; she deals with wave upon wave of thug trying to bring her down. She walks out of each situation, triumphant with the cash. She never appears to kill anyone.

All these set-pieces are very good, quite electrifying in fact, though every single one of them goes on for about ten per cent too long in running time. And in between these fights we have acres of poorly-scripted melodrama and saccharine storylines, very much part of Thai film culture, but not usually exported beyond its own shores.

This is a real treat for genre fans, but I hope Yanin gets hired by a much better director sometime soon. These athletes have such short careers and she deserves much better than Pinkaew, who should have been working on an international stage by now, but seems content to stay in Thailand sending out the same old thing.

Bond Saves M16

Secret documents, released after more than 60 years to the British National Archives at Kew, London, reveal that James Bond author Ian Fleming as good as saved British Intelligence service M16 from collapse just after the outbreak of World War Two.

Fleming was the navy’s liaison officer with MI6 and advised against the creation of a rival service headed up by the Royal Navy. Much of his experience at the time provided invaluable background information for his successful novels and the rather more fanciful films.

Read more here

Another British newspaper has published a major spoiler for a key assassination scene in the new Bond movie - read it here - but be warned, it gives the game away...

Scorsese and De Niro together again

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are to reunite for a mafia film, according to industry bible Variety.

Paramount has brought Steve Zaillian on board to adapt "I Heard You Paint Houses," the book about the mob assassin who many believe was involved in the death of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Zaillian won an Oscar for Schindler’s List and worked with Scorsese on Gangs of New York.

The book’s title comes from the grisly mafia slang for a hired assassin who ‘decorates’ walls with blood.

Eagle Eye [The Review]

Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a Stanford drop-out who can’t pay his rent and works by day at a copy store. Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) is a single mother fussing over her young son’s rail trip to play trumpet at a big Washington event on Capitol Hill. Out of the blue, both individuals receive phone-calls from a mysterious woman who seems able to monitor their every move, and who appears to be co-opting them, against their will, into a secret service operation of terrifying obscurity.

With a surprising No 1 box-office ascendancy on its opening weekend, Eagle Eye seems to have gripped the public imagination with its lowering sense of high-tech paranoia; perhaps Joe Public is over-impressed by the presence of Steven Spielberg as a producer. It’s true that director D.J. Caruso (paired again with his leading man from Disturbia) has an eye for the dizzying detail, and for much of this movie you forget how extraordinarily dumb the script and the premise of the script really is. It looks amazing. Over and over again, you get involved and drawn in by the pulse and sheer kinetic force of the visuals. But if I was to tell you that the main plot point revolves around the combination of a child’s trumpet and an exploding diamond, you may get some idea of just how silly this film is.

Shia LaBeouf is in almost every scene and plays it like an untrained, reluctant Jack Bauer. If anything Eagle Eye proves just how influential the TV show 24 has become over the years. The jury is still out when it comes to his leading-man status; personally I don’t think he has either the looks or the star-quality or the acting chops. Michelle Monaghan similarly plays it like a tv show and behaves for much of the time like a needy, nagging wife, in something of a throwback to helpless femmes in action movies of the 1980’s. And just who is the mysterious woman who keeps calling them on the phone, and who does she represent? Well, I won’t spoil it for you but I will give you a clue – this uncredited actress sounds a bit like Majel Barrett on Star Trek.

In a recent piece of most unwelcome news, it seems that one of the scriptwriters of this thriller, Travis Wright, is developing a sequel to Bladerunner. Let’s hope someone else, who has a firmer grip on plot development, and crafting credible and emotionally-resonant scenes, is drafted in before this bad-idea movie ever gets made.

Spider-Man's next foes?

Which villains will tussle with the webslinger in Spider-Man 4 and 5 to be shot back-to-back next year?

1) The Lizard: Ever since Dylan Baker was introduced as one-armed Dr. Curt Connors in Spider-Man 2, fans have been anticipating a return. In comics lore, Connors, experimenting with a formula to regenerate his limb, unwittingly transforms himself into a cold-blooded monster. Odds: Even

2) The Vulture: Before Marvel executives insisted Raimi shoe-horn Venom into Spider-Man 3, the director was reportedly toying with bringing Ben Kingsley, always one to puff up his regal feathers, on board as this carrion-eating careerist. Odds: 3-1

3) Man-Wolf: Remember J. Jonah Jameson's astronaut son, who Mary-Jane Watson was engaged to in Spider-Man 2? Back in the 1970s, Marvel's writers had him morph into, ahem, a space werewolf. Odds: 20-1

4) The Black Cat: With Kirsten Dunst's involvement in the sequels still uncertain, could this kitty be coming through the cat flap soon? Odds: 5-1

5) Kraven the Hunter: Trophy nut Kraven comes to New York City to hunt down the most challenging foe of all: Spiderman. Raimi has an acknowledged weak spot for 1960s vintage Kraven-era Spider-Man, but would be hard pressed to make this villain interesting. Odds: 10-1

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Marvel site is here

Spiderfan is here