Father Geek here, luckily the Prof. was monitoring all are systems when we had the great mail overload and was able to snatch this story from the brink of oblivion. As much trouble as our mail problems were I'm just glad that the 3 different warnings to NOT open certain subject matter mail got through first , or we might have ended up with Ebay and CNN's problems. I did have to dump 5 seperate worm infected mail files on both mine and Harry's computers. Well, here's the intercepted report as it was filed from LA this morning...
This one came in while Father Geek's e-mail was down and my computer was coughing up this week's RUMBLINGS. Thankfully, though, it didn't get lost. THE MOOCH has done a great job sorting out all those mentions of a possible Manchester musical, and he's also seen THE BEACH, so all you Boyle fans... meet The Mooch!
I've just been reading something on your site referring to some sort of recent "scoop" that suggested Danny Boyle's next film will be a Manchester Music Scene film. I don't know where this is from, but I was at a preview of The Beach a couple of weeks ago in Manchester that had a Boyle / Hodge / MacDonald / Garland Q & A that I imagine could have been the source, as Boyle mentioned the potential for a good music film to be made about Manchester. That was it. If this was the source then it was just a slightly sychophantic, flippant remark and not even worth being called a "rumour". A question was asked about the soundtrack for The Beach and this lead to him joking that the Trainspotting troika would all rather be in a band "especially John", and then someone asked them if they would make a film about music, to which Boyle said that it would be very hard, and there haven't really been many good ones, but that he thinks there is a really good story waiting to be made (ie. there is the potential in the subject for someone to create a good story and film), before adding for about the fourth time in the music-related bit of the Q & A: "especially about Manchester" (he is from Manchester as well).
As for someone's suggestion that a Boyle Manchester film could be linked to a script Shaun Ryder has written, that is completely incorrect, Ryder's script is about drugs, violence and prostitution in Manchester, not the music and not the early 90's Madchester scene. It is supposed to be directed by the guy who made The Grape Tapes documentary about Ryder's Black Grape band, as stated by someone in the talk back to the recent article I read. As for the suggestion in that talkback that this mythical Boyle project is a biopic of Joy Division, that is another flippant, throwaway remark made by Boyle in a tiny little sidebar interview accompanying The Beach soundtrack review in Select magazine.
There are three real projects that I have heard of relating to John Hodge and / or Danny Boyle (NOT necessarily both), and the sources for these are publications. Apparently Hodge is adapting the book A White Merc With Fins, the first novel by the guy (James Hawkes? I can't remember his name too clearly) who went on to adapt his own second novel, Rancid Aluminium into the new Joseph Fiennes film which I haven't seen but is getting the absolute worst reviews of the year so far (putting it in the Mad Cows, Fanny & Elvis, Guest House Paradiso bracket, but with guns). This was mentioned in The Face magazine review of this guy's third novel and just said that A White Merc With Fins is "getting the John Hodge/Trainspotting treatment" which I'm suspecting doesn't actually mean Boyle as well. Another rumour has been that Boyle is chasing Chuck Palahniuk's second novel (after Fight Club), Survivor.
I personally think that Boyle would be pretty wrong for this book, having seen what he's made of the excellent material in Garland's The Beach, Survivor strikes me more of a Mary Harron picture (I can't wait for American Psycho, YOU MUST SEE 'I SHOT ANDY WARHOL' NOW, its fucking great. Absolutely amazing). However, the third project sounds as if it could tread on a Survivor adaptation's toes. Ages ago, way back during The Beach pre-production, there was a little piece in the sorely sorely sorely missed Neon magazine (the best magazine around, now defunct whilst we still have Empire AND Total Film AND Film Review, senseless, senseless) in which Hodge mentioned an original script he had written, a satire about the ridiculous nature of celebrity and the press (particularly tabloid). The film centres around two feuding British celebrities. Hodge indicated that Boyle and MacDonald would not be involved, and SEEMED to suggest that the troika would be splitting up after The Beach was done. This was around the time of the aftermath of the failure of A Life Less Ordinary and indeed, in a recent Guardian article, Andrew MacDonald said that if The Beach was a failure they would all be trying to apportion blame and would likely end up blaming each other and part. I have heard absolutely nothing else about this project but it is possible that any observations of Hodge's about the nature of celebrity could be consumed by a Survivor adaptation, featuring as it does savage satire on an AMERICA (key word for Boyle) run by agents and men behind the men behind drugged-up zoned-out good-looking celebrities. Featuring - of course - the trademark Palahniuk apocalyptic-framing-device (this time the narrator is talking into the black box recorder of an empty 747 he is about to crash), Survivor concerns the lone survivor of a religious death cult who becomes a famous celebrity religious leader with all the ghostwritten merchandising that implies. He hooks up with a strange girl who dreams disasters and accidents that will happen in the future, having met her at the tomb of her brother, who the narrator anonymously persuaded to commit suicide, as is his hobby after a Helpline missprinted their number. It becomes apparent that another survivor may be around, trying to kill death cult members who didn't commit suicide as they had sworn to do. Palahniuk has said that it is all about the education system.
"Moriarty" here again. Just wanted to interject that I think SURVIVOR is actually a better book than FIGHT CLUB in most ways, and I think it's a great project for Boyle to pursue. I've heard his name attached to it several times, but I also know that nothing's been officially decided yet.
Anyway, brief review of The Beach:
It's a question of ethics, and basically I'm fucked. Due to an exam in Old English ("cwaed Edmund cyninges" roughly translates as YOU CHOSE THE WRONG DEGREE) on the same day as the screening, I got there ten minutes into the film, during Carlyle's speech to Leo in the Thai hotel / hostel place. So this is before he is even given the map, but still fucks up my sense of the rhythms of the picture. But I will say that it will be a lot better experience for those who have not read the book than for those who have, since - as has been widely reported - the story has been extremely pared down. The film itself is good. Leo is very irritating, even though the punching-the-air thing seems to have been cut and the will-not-die-today thing is fine in its context. He tries hard. He approaches the role with enthusiasm and energy. He is just not a good actor. Its the same feeling you get watching his screaming / squealing outside his mother's door in Basketball Diaries, and there is quite a lot of squealy-screaming here too (in his most enthusiastic Supermarket Brat way).
The book just seems to have become very very simplified. Leo just comes off like a sulky teenager when the character is supposed to be descending into darkness. The film is too short. It is about 2 hours and it absolutely races by. Of course, I missed ten minutes but it seems in too much of a rush to get to the beach, and then in too much of a rush to get off again. The book focuses a lot on the realtionships between the community members, and spends a great deal of time subtlely setting up factions and orchestrating splits in the group, leading to the great - if a little rushed - ending, but the film is not concerned with these relationships, going for a wider brushstroke of Us On The Beach verses All Them. Also, Boyle's admirable penchant for trying out different visual ideas backfires a few times: the terrible computer game sequence ranks alongside A Life Less Ordinary's claymation epilogue. When reading the book, I kept thinking that it would be extremely difficult to make into a film overall but that there were some strikingly cinematic images that would work brilliantly. Boyle's film acheives all the hard things - a beautiful realisation of the beach itself - and ignores all the great things: the dream sequences, the morbid darkness / Richard's growing fascination with self-destruction; and Hodge's familiar Clerks-esque quickfire-gag-compilation device (as in the lodger interviews in Shallow Grave and the phone-booth sequence in A Life Less Ordinary) is over-used here, almost "relied upon" and Carlyle wins the Darth Maul award for Not Being In It Nearly Enough.
But as disappointing as it is next to the book, the basic story is good and interesting and although a million book readers will think they could have done it better, it is still a good film. It looks gorgeous, the french couple are good, as is community leader Tilda Swinton and comedy cameo man Unhygenix. No matter how they have fluffed the explosive potential of the project, it is very very entertaining. There are also some truly great sequences, basically everything with the amazing Carlyle in it - the hotel room shoot out is exactly what we're looking for. As for DuPont's C.R.A.S.H. (I believe The Beach was the founding member), it is fine, not irritating at all, although the scene itself is pretty horrid.
Ultimately, it seems like a great film cut down to a decent one. Boyle had remarked in a magazine that he had a first cut of 4 hours, a "more kaleidoscopic" version, I wonder how flippant that remark was. But the environmentally concious should brace themselves: this book can be done again.
Mooch
