Blu-ray Review: Cleopatra (1963)

"Surely Cleopatra will come to mark the end of a Hollywood era... There will always be movies of course, and presumably better ones than there ever were before; and yet they won't be quite as grand, as foolish, as wonderful as they used to be." These were the prophetic words of Cleopatra publicist Nat Weiss, written in 1962 after his first viewing of the film. He's not wrong: you don't get films more grand or more foolish than Cleopatra, whose production woes are perhaps more legendary than the film itself. Star illnesses, production delays, director firings, studio relocations, and the real-life celebrity romance of celebrity romances - this one had the lot.

Cinema Review: John Carter (2012)

Since I saw it about two weeks ago, John Carter has already gone down in the record books as one of the most costly flops of all time. That will therefore be its legacy, rather than the quality (or otherwise) of the film itself, which is the criteria by which I intend to judge it. Clearly greenlighted in the wake of Avatar's success, John Carter's story shares superficial similarities, primarily the central theme of a normal Earthling thrust into an alien world, who then learns to adapt to the new world's ways and cultures. Disney's hype machine have made sure to point out that Avatar was in fact one of many sci-fi stories inspired by the John Carter tale, which is nearly a hundred years old, its origins being Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, first published as a novel in 1917. The film's original title was John Carter of Mars - infinitely better than the totally bland moniker we ended up with.