Monthly Archives: December 2022

Film, TV, and Theatre

Will Ferrell in Elf (2003)

Leave a comment

Any­one seen Elf again recent­ly? I have, and although I came late to the par­ty, some years after its 2003 release, it’s a Christ­mas sta­ple in our house. It’s just a joy to watch, with great per­for­mances from Will Fer­rell as Bud­dy the human-who-thinks-he’s‑an-elf, and a strong sup­port­ing cast includ­ing James Caan and Zooey Deschanel (great comedic actress lat­er to star in Amer­i­can sit­com New Girl). It’s just a charm­ing, sil­ly fam­i­ly film but a sub­lime­ly-made charm­ing, sil­ly fam­i­ly film. The direc­tor was Jon Favreau, who is known for films as diverse as rom­com, musi­cal dra­ma, adven­ture and sci-fi, and includ­ing sev­er­al of the Mar­vel Stu­dios movies.

The first script for Elf was writ­ten way back in 1993 by Amer­i­can screen­writer David Beren­baum, with Jim Car­rey in mind to play Bud­dy. How­ev­er, as the project took years to get off the ground, Car­rey went on instead to pro­duce that oth­er fes­tive favourite in 2000’s How The Grinch Stole Christ­mas, and Will Far­rell joined the project instead. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a human baby, inad­ver­tent­ly brought back to the North Pole in Santa’s sack, who is brought up as an elf, and who lat­er tracks down his bio­log­i­cal father in New York. As an “inno­cent abroad”, there is none so inno­cent as this.

While you might assume that a lot of com­put­er trick­ery was employed to make Will Fer­rell look big­ger than his fel­low actors in the North Pole, Jon Favreau favoured cam­era tech­niques and trick­ery to cre­ate the illu­sion. He used the con­cept of “forced per­spec­tive”, along with the build­ing of two sets, one small­er than the oth­er, with one raised clos­er and small­er and one big­ger and fur­ther away. With the two sets mea­sured and lined up, the direc­tor could have one per­son on one set appear to be much larg­er than a per­son on the oth­er set. The only CGI in the film was some snow­ing.

The scene with Peter Din­klage is riotous­ly fun­ny, and is best viewed with­out food or drink in your mouth. The scene is set in the board­room of the children’s book pub­lish­ing house that Buddy’s father works for, under pres­sure to come up with the next best-sell­er. Din­klage plays a paid exter­nal children’s book wun­derkind come to bail out the com­pa­ny with his great ideas. Dinklage’s char­ac­ter, like Din­klage him­self, has dwarfism and the jux­ta­po­si­tion of inno­cence and offence that ensues, when Bud­dy enters the room and thinks he is see­ing an actu­al elf, is bril­liant. For the view­ing audi­ence it is a case of see­ing both sides…and it’s very, very fun­ny, so Mer­ry Christ­mas!

Will Fer­rell as Bud­dy the Elf

 

Literature

HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds (1898)

Leave a comment

HG (Her­bert George) Wells (1866–1946) was a pro­lif­ic writer with more than fifty nov­els and dozens of short sto­ries to his name. His out­put was an eclec­tic mix, includ­ing works of social com­men­tary, pol­i­tics, his­to­ry, pop­u­lar sci­ence, satire, biog­ra­phy, and futur­ism (he fore­saw the advent of air­craft, tanks, space trav­el, nuclear weapons, satel­lite tele­vi­sion and some­thing akin to the World Wide Web) – but of course what he is best remem­bered for is his sci­ence fic­tion, fol­low­ing the remark­able rapid-fire pub­li­ca­tion over a four-year peri­od of instant clas­sics The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doc­tor More­au (1896), The Invis­i­ble Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

The War of the Worlds is one of the ear­li­est sto­ries to detail a con­flict between mankind and an extra-ter­res­tri­al race. It presents itself as a fac­tu­al account of a Mar­t­ian inva­sion as wit­nessed by the nar­ra­tor. You know the plot: appar­ent mete­ors have rained down around the narrator’s home town of Wok­ing (through which I trav­elled by train recent­ly, prompt­ing me to make a men­tal note to write this very blog), but which of course turn out to be far from inor­gan­ic space rock, but instead very much not-friend­ly space aliens bent on destroy­ing human­i­ty.

The first edi­tion was illus­trat­ed by British artist War­wick Gob­le: inky, black-and-white depic­tions that were eerie, imag­i­na­tive, excit­ing, and thor­ough­ly of their late Vic­to­ri­an time. Lat­er, in 1906, the French edi­tions were illus­trat­ed by the Brazil­ian artist Hen­rique Alvim Cor­rêa, which turned out to be some­thing of an upgrade, adding to the evo­ca­tion of Wells’ imag­ined crea­tures and their ves­sels, and of which Wells him­self might­i­ly approved.

The War of the Worlds has spawned half a dozen fea­ture films and tele­vi­sion series, a record album and musi­cal show (Jeff Wayne, of course), but per­haps the most impact­ful drama­ti­sa­tion came in the 1938 radio pro­gramme direct­ed by and star­ring Orson Welles. It was very much played for real and if you hap­pened to miss the intro­duc­to­ry mono­logue – which thou­sands of lis­ten­ers did – you could be for­giv­en for think­ing the dra­ma was a live news­cast of devel­op­ing events. The pro­gramme famous­ly cre­at­ed wide­spread pan­ic with hordes of peo­ple believ­ing that  a real-life Mar­t­ian inva­sion was under­way right then in North Amer­i­ca (Welles had swapped out Wok­ing for Grover’s Mill, New Jer­sey). It’s easy to scoff at the mass cred­u­lous­ness of the pub­lic, but you decide: here’s a clip of the broad­cast. Might you have believed it, too?

HG Wells