FictionMachine Unknown

A teenage girl obsessed with imagination and fantasy angrily wishes for her baby brother to be spirited away by goblins – only to discover goblins have done exactly as she asks. To rescue her brother she must make her way through an elaborate maze filled with bizarre creatures, and she must do it within thirteen hours if she wants to ever see her brother again.Labyrinth is one of the most popular children’s films of all time. Since its release in 1986 it has become part of a select group of perennial favourites with audiences, re-discovered by one generation after another for its bold visual imagery, popular songs, and enchanting characters. The film itself marks a unique collision of talents between writers (including former Monty Python performer Terry Jones), director (Muppet creator Jim Henson), producer (Star Wars creator George Lucas) and stars (including iconic musician and actor David Bowie). The film tells a broadly familiar story, but it tells it in a comparatively unique and wonderful fashion.You can read the full essay at the FictionMachine website here.

Ben Stiller is a noted writer, director and performer of Hollywood comedies, who has headlined such blockbuster hits as There’s Something About Mary (1998), Zoolander (2001) and Tropic Thunder (2008). He is not necessarily the first name to spring to mind when thinking about horror movies, yet in 2008 he and his business partner Stuart Cornfeld produced The Ruins, a rarely seen yet stunningly effective horror film. It is a film as relentless as it is bleak, filled with dread and constantly rising tension. It is a film that gets under your skin – in the case of its protagonists, quite literally so.

In May 2008 Warner Bros released the glossy and expensive action film Speed Racerinto cinemas around the world. Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, it was a live-action adaptation of a once-popular children’s cartoon made on a US$130 million dollar budget, blessed with wall-to-wall advertising and given a prime summer release date. It under-performed terribly, losing the studio tens of millions of dollars and failing to engage too many critics.It’s not simply that the film wasn’t a commercial success; it seemed to be actively ignored. Here was an expensive, visual effects-driven blockbuster, written and directed by the siblings who created the phenomenally successful Matrix trilogy, featuring performances by quality actors like John Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Christina Ricci, based on a Japanese anime with enormous cult appeal, and it was as if one could hear crickets. Movies under-perform and flop all the time, but in the case of a visually distinctive, colourful film like Speed Racer there is usually the consolation of some kind of cult status. At the time of writing the film is eight years old, and that cult following still has not developed.It’s a sad end for a movie that took Warner Bros 16 years and five directors to bring to the screen.

Japanese animation turns 100 years old in 2017. The art form
initially flourished in 1917, as animators including Oten Shimokawa and
Seitarou Kitayama produced short comedic films that ran for only a few
minutes each. While the vast majority of those early animated shorts are
now lost – due variously to time, humidity, earthquakes and the
American fire-bombing of Tokyo – Japan’s animation (or ‘anime’, to use
the borrowed Japanese term) industry has continued to thrive ever since.
Numerous directors have been and gone over the decades, and the
industry has expanded and contracted. If we were to highlight a single
filmmaker as the best artist anime has produced over that time, it’s a
fairly safe bet that the majority of fans, critics and observers will
cite Hayao Miyazaki. Furthermore if we were to highlight the very best
film Miyazaki had directed, I suspect the majority would cite his 1988
fantasy My Neighbor Totoro.

Mention the name Edgar Rice Burroughs to many people and they’ll
immediately recognise him as the creator of Tarzan, the popular pulp
hero of novels and film who endured throughout the 20th
century as one of the world’s most popular fictional characters. Less
well known that Tarzan, however, is John Carter. This Virginian Civil
War veteran travelled to the planet Mars in a string of pulp adventures,
all written by Burroughs.While the Tarzan books were adapted to cinema as early as 1918 (in Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan),
John Carter’s road to the cinema took almost exactly 100 years, three
movie studios, six directors and countless writers, artists and
designers along the way.

‘As a writer,’ said William Goldman, ‘the only book I really like is The Princess Bride.'
Goldman’s original take on the classical fairy tale was first
published in 1973. The book in itself is a literary classic, and wonderful to read. It
is eclipsed these days, however, by its motion picture adaptation.
Despite all of the strengths of the original novel, in 1987 director Rob
Reiner took The Princess Bride and somehow adapted a fantastic
book into an even better film. Its fans have included both United
States President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II. It really is one of
the most broadly enjoyable movies ever produced.Here's a story about how they made it.