Gorilla Film Magazine Issue 3

Ladies and Gentlemen, Gorilla Film Magazine Issue 3 is available to read on our website. That’s right, we finally really did it.

You Maniacs!

Issue 3 is the best yet; we’ve packed it full of nutritious independent filmmaking tips, practical guides, theory and interviews, topped off with a dollop of humour, and our trademark Gorilla aesthetic. We have interviews with filmmakers David Fedele and Oliver Schmitz, as well as Kino London founder Jamie Kennerley. There are reviews of a bunch of interesting short films, including Uppercut, Loom and Way of the Morris. We’ve got informative articles on producing, dramatic license, film composing, sound recording, workflow management, a film festival for people with learning disabilities, movie monsters, British science fiction and how to storyboard.

Sex.

Print is something that we’re very passionate about here, but unfortunately print is also very expensive. We’re only in the pupa stage of our magazine publishing career, and so to make sure we don’t burn ourselves out too fast, we made the decision to release Issue 3 in a digital format online. We’re working towards getting Gorilla back to its acoustic origins, but for now, we hope your attention spans can handle the online publication.

Well what are you waiting for? Read Issue 3 online now! 

Gorilla Film Magazine: Issue 3 is going digital

Print is something that we’re very passionate about here, but unfortunately print is also very expensive. We’re only in the pupa stage of our magazine publishing career, and so to make sure we don’t burn ourselves out too fast, we made the decision to release Issue 3 in a digital format online. We’re working towards getting Gorilla Film Magazine back to its acoustic origins, but for now, we hope your attention spans can handle the online publication.

The online view of the magazine will be available on the website, free of charge from Friday the 28th of October 2011.

If you like, you can join our group page on Facebook.

Terra Nova: It’s Swiss Family Robinson meets Jurassic Park

Everybody’s looking anxious, except Stephen Lang, obviously 

While having Steven Spielberg attached as an executive producer may have carried some weight before, after the unwatchable Falling Skies television series, expectations of  Terra Nova have been significantly lowered. This is a very good thing, because people certainly shouldn’t tune in to this new fantasy science fiction series expecting anything other than b-movie quality. However, that is not to say Terra Nova is anything short of spectacular, the first episode (double bill) was a big, clumsy behemoth; an action adventure family drama set in a beautifully realised fantasy and inhabited by dinosaurs.

The story starts off in an overpopulated future city, the air thick with pollution and lit up by holographic advertisements reminding everyone “a family is four”. Jim Shannon’s family is actually five; his youngest daughter being technically illegal, and it’s not long into the program before he’s paying the price for it.

The dinosaurs pale in comparison to Stephen Lang’s scenery chewing

Jim’s wife, Elisabeth, is a rather talented trauma surgeon, and is asked to join the Terra Nova tenth pilgrimage, which is a one-way trip through a time portal, 85 million years into the past. Elisabeth can bring her two legal children, Josh and Maddy, but not little Zoe, because the Government can’t be seen to be giving favours to families who break the law. Jim himself can’t go either, as he’s in jail, serving a long sentence for assaulting a couple of unpleasant police officers. This presents somewhat of a dilemma, and even before we see our first dinosaur the show has all the makings of a cheesy Sci-fi epic. Naturally things work out for our Swiss Family Robinson, and soon we’re travelling through the crack in time, to a wonderfully imagined colony, surrounded by a huge fence and a dense jungle beyond.

The new world is presented as a separate timeline, with an alternate future, this means the pilgrims can step on as many bugs as they want, but it also means they can never return to the Earth they knew (probably for the best). The show takes it’s time establishing the new world, although it’s fair to say the details are in the props and locations, not so much the characters, who are all fairly generic at this point. To be fair the show has more than made up for it’s flat characters with a lush, fantastical world. Everything has been well thought out, from Obama’s face on the currency, to Jim’s futuristic phone, which is simply a screen embedded in the fabric of his coat arm.

Unfortunately, Stephen Lang isn’t in this picture

Pleasingly, Stephen Lang is the man in charge of the Terra Nova colony, and he chews the scenery wonderfully. He plays grizzled old Taylor, and looks and acts exactly like his character in the Avatar film, it’s as if Quaritch had survived Pandora and become an environmentalist. At one point he actually yells “Damnation”, hopefully this will be a recurring catchphrase.

The actors are all solid, if unremarkable, apart from Lang who easily steals the show, but Terra Nova’s main appeal is, of course, the dinosaurs. It’s clear a good deal of the show’s big budget has gone on making sure the dinosaurs don’t look dreadful, and it’s fair to say the FX guys did a pretty good job. Naturally they could never compare to Jurassic Park, they don’t have the money, time or industry professionals to pull off something of that quality, but as far as CGI beasties go, these ones are really effective. Cleverly, the Terra Nova people have gone a long way to make sure these dinos are different to Speilberg’s creations. The show is set in the Cretaceous period, not the Jurassic, and the writer’s have been very creative with the depiction of the creatures, going as far as making some of them up (though always with the blessing of John Horner).

The dinosaurs are almost as epic as Stephen Lang

Terra Nova may not be an intelligent, serious drama, but then what do you expect from a series that has a pun in its title? It’s big budget, b-grade fun, an exciting ride and a fantastic spectacle. It slipped up in a few places, not least when it decided to ruin a perfectly good mystery at the end of the double bill, but then I’m guessing ‘Genesis’ was made to be a pilot, and the writer’s felt they needed to set up some kind of grand story-arch to hook their audience. The dialogue is often pretty clunky, but that adds to the appeal, it’s an absurd fantasy epic about a family trying to get along in the Cretaceous period, don’t expect Shakespeare.

It’ll be interesting to see how Terra Nova evolves, the family drama element is actually quite appealing in the dinosaur infested setting, and the thought of seeing what new misadventures the Shannon family get themselves into each week is very intriguing. Terra Nova is really silly, but when you make a science fiction drama about living with dinosaurs, you kind of need to be.

Terra Nova is currently being broadcast on Sky1. 

LARPing thriller The Wild Hunt, Screening at the Prince Charles

There will be a screening of The Wild Hunt tomorrow at The Prince Charles Cinema (3.30pm) and the film looks positively crazy. It’s being presented as The Lord of the Rings meets Lord of the Flies and is basically a thriller set in the world of Live Action Role Playing.

The synopsis goes like this: Erik despises the escapist fantasy world of LARPing in Medieval re-enactment games that his brother Bjorn and girlfriend Lyn are involved in. But things go from bad to worse when Lyn not only becomes involved with the world of the LARPers, but is also seduced by Murtagh, the charismatic clan leader in the game so loved by his brother. He realises that he has now to follow her into the game if he is to stand any chance of winning her back. Things become gradually more fraught and emotions start to run high as their mission to win back the Princess stirs up the jealousy of Murtagh and his gang as the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur.

Gorilla Film Magazine will be at the screening tomorrow, so expect a review coming soon. If you want to catch the screening yourself, you can find out more by clicking on this link. And don’t forget to check out The Wild Hunt website and trailer below.

Apparently, actual LARPers in costume are welcome, and there will be a prize for the best dressed!

Fresh Meat: The Painful New Comedy From the Creators of Peep Show

For most of us, university life was a surreal experience, particularly the first year when so many students were trying to establish a new personality. Many impressionable young individuals were feeling immense pressure to fit in to the new social norm, and others still were desperately attempting to project themselves as different and interesting.

Fresh Meat is a new comedy from the creators of Peep Show, and as you can imagine, it’s both very funny and horribly cringe-worthy. The series attempts to do for university students what Peep Show did for people in their early thirties; it essentially depicts them in a way that is truthful, albeit in a stylised manner. The show follows six student Freshers, all totally different stereotypes but each a well of potential comedy.

The jokes come thick and fast, with some really clever lines, and very knowing characterisation. However, underlying everything is this incredible melancholy, as each student struggles with their identity, and a not wholly unjustified feeling of inadequacy and loneliness. There’s also an overwhelming sense of apathy from each and every one of the characters, which is great because it accurately portrays that sense of self-involvement that young people feel. Most British students are barely into their twenties when they start uni, and are therefore often obsessed with themselves and their own little problems, while those who aren’t so egotistical are either regarded as arrogant or simply weird.

Fresh Meat does a very good job of portraying the university stereotypes, accurately sending up the personalities of the British student lifestyle. It’s also wonderfully surreal, unbearably cruel and showing great potential.

The series is available to watch now on 4oD, you can watch it now by clicking on this link.

Doctor Who Season Six’s Conclusion Leaves Some Intriguing Possibilities

Season six of everybody’s favourite time traveling humanoid Doctor has come to an end, and the conclusion to Steven Moffat’s timey wimey adventure was refreshingly easy to understand. If you’ve been able to follow the sometimes head scratching journey of Matt Smith’s Doctor, his young companion and step mother, her centurion husband and the Doctor’s future wife and eventual killer, then The Wedding of River Song would have been a fairly straight forward viewing. For the uninitiated, however, it probably made about as much sense as a talking ham sandwich.

It’s nice to know that everything has been neatly tied up, all the annoying questions have been answered and any remaining are too far away and general to be concerned with at present. Most intriguingly of all, Doctor Who has managed to kind of reboot itself, without having to kill anybody off, by putting the Doctor back in the shadows and making the universe believe he’s dead. Hopefully this means that the grander, often less interesting  epic space adventures will be taking a back seat, and we’ll get to see more of Matt Smith going incognito.

While Doctor Who is clearly a beloved stable of the BBC, and jolly good fun for all the family, it does suffer from an excessive kookiness and noticeably B-grade plots, characters and sets. The show is at it’s best when not indulging in delusions of grandeur, and actually Matt Smith’s Doctor does a really good job of side stepping David Tennant’s messiah complex, while still injecting the character with enough darkness to keep things interesting.

The great thing about Doctor Who is that the protagonist manages to carry that darkness without becoming a generic anti-hero, instead his flaws are a lot more interesting; he’s needy, he puts others in danger simply because he hates the thought of being alone, and worst of all he knows what he’s doing, but he just can’t help himself. That kind of depth makes the Doctor a much more interesting protagonist than simply being a white knight or an avenging angel.

Matt Smith pulls all this off remarkably well and adds a kind of dorky, weirdo persona that makes him instantly likeable to children, he is indeed a time travelling clown, albeit one that is quite probably insane. The Doctor was, of course, always a little unhinged, so perhaps Smith’s biggest contribution to the character is making him so flippant, a lot less melancholy than Tennant and seemingly able to convey the oldness of the character (which may be attributed to his strangely shaped head, indeed he already looks like an alien).

So, at the end of season six almost everybody believes the Doctor is dead, which, to be fair, he really should be. And yet, as we’ve come to realise, the Doctor lies, and he also really doesn’t want to die, even if the prophecy (or whatever it is) insists that he must, for the salvation of the universe. The Doctor being forgotten, slinking back into the shadows, and becoming that mysterious old fart he was in the original, long ago, series is certainly an intriguing idea. Hopefully this means Doctor Who will drop it’s attempts at making an epic space opera and focus on what it does best: scaring the shit out of children.

Doctor Who is currently available to watch on BBC iplayer.