There’s a grassroots campaign underway to get Sam Rockwell an Oscar nomination for his role as Sam Bell in Moon.

It’s been a good long while since I considered the Academy Awards important, but I do believe that I didn’t see another actor come anywhere close to Rockwell’s performance this year. It’s a measure of his craft in Moon that you forget this is basically a one-man show, but it’s also a drawback in terms of Oscar because it tends to be the more showy performances that get the Academy’s attention. And yet, watching the film again with the commentaries and some of the behind-the-scenes footage you realise just how technically perfect Rockwell is.

I was intrigued to hear about how some of the more complicated shots were achieved and its always a pleasant surprise when a movie manages to trick your eye and brain. Where most movies batter the audience in special effects at their cost, Moon has a remarkable number of effects that don’t pull you out of the film. I’d love to force the likes of Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay and James Cameron to watch this movie and then try to justify their ridiculous budgets.

It was a surprise to learn how much of the more complex Sam Bell shots relied on Rockwell nailing and balancing the performances, memorising cues and eye lines and consistently carrying the story almost solo. That alone should be enough for the nomination. That he creates characters that get under your skin and have you thinking of them long after the film finishes is probably wasted on those who make the Oscar decisions.

It’s worth mentioning that this is the same guy who could have just gone off to work with a more established director or make another movie with George Clooney. Small gold statuette or not he deserves kudos for taking a gamble on Moon and giving us something very special.

ps The Moon official website just launched.

Here be spoilers. Go buy MOON on Blu-ray before you read another word.

The greater good in film tends to require sacrifice. It’s why MacReady sits in the snow waiting to see what happens. It’s why Freeman dies never knowing if anyone found the note in the bottle that he threw into the sea. Sometimes this final selfless act is rewarded. The best and most recent example being a garbage collector, who in a wonderful example of screenwriting not only comes back from the dead, but in doing so reveals he’s a lot more than the sum of his parts. Turns out the little fucker has a soul*.

Which brings us neatly enough to Sam Bell and probably the most human story I’ve ever seen in hard science fiction.

There is a greater good in Moon, but Bell doesn’t sacrifice himself for it. He’s betrayed for it.

For the first clone we meet the revelation comes too late and that’s the scene that kills me. It’s also where I believe Moon is pushed from a merely excellent film to a perfect one. Sam’s already in denial about what’s going on – even when confronted with himself in the form of the second Sam**. By the time he’s got a handle on the truth he’s falling apart. And then, and this is when Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker really turn the screws on the character and the audience, Sam phones home.

We’ve had characters discover they’ve been living a lie before – it’s a reliable staple in science fiction for a reason – but this is the only time I’ve seen someone put in such a corner. Death is bad enough, but the poor bastard just had his life taken away as well.

He never had a chance. He breaks down, wants to go home, and if you’re like me you break down right along with him.

And that’s why the script is smart enough to throw away the revelation of the clones at the close of the first act, when less confident writers would have tried to reveal it much later. The movie brilliantly plays with the audience’s expectations through GERTY’s programming, and sets new standards of visual effects when Sam interacts with himself, while reveling in old school minature and model work elsewhere. Once the baton is passed to the second Sam, we’re back in the fight that both O’Niel and Ripley faced in Outland and Alien and we’re very much rooting for the underdog. That the bastards also managed to squeeze in a visual reference to Tron that I missed on the first five or six viewings is just icing on the cake.

But the first Sam still dies.

This is some sophisticated science fiction. It wears its influences on its sleeve, but never takes the lazy route of homage most movies do. Instead it prefers to go all out and risk everything on sharing that very special space that earlier movies carved out for themselves.

When you take into account Sam Rockwell’s performance, Clint Mansell’s score and the fact that the whole shebang cost only $5million(!) I’ll go as far as saying that Moon is the first truly important science fiction movie of the 21st century.

Fuck it. I’ll go further. Moon is better than 2001: A Space Odyssey by a country mile.

*If you’ve been following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter you’ll know how easy souls are to project

**one thing we learn in the director’s commentary is that Sam 1 and Sam 2 are actually Sam 5 and Sam 6

It’s probably safe to say at this point that I’m something of a fan of Judge Dredd.

Sadly to lots of people that just brings back bad memories of the Sylvester Stallone movie. There’s a new Dredd project gearing up that will hopefully overwrite the last attempt, but you really need to go back to the source to appreciate the impact this guy had on a couple of generations.

So when I saw that @Termight was starting to fabricate actual helmets I was very interested. You may remember I already have some incredibly cool Termight merchandise so even though I’m not a big collector of this kind of thing (or fully understand the need to have a Harry Potter wand in a fucking display case) I knew the finished thing would have had a lot of work put into it. The attention to detail on the badge and buckle are exact so I new something on a larger scale was going to be special. Here’s what happened on Friday morning:

Showing the thing off on Twitter I was immediately christened ‘Old Man Mountain Dredd’ (cheers @stml), but the video and subsequent pics sent a little wave through the 2000AD demographic of my followers. Been a bit busy since then, but here are a few more photos for those of you that don’t think this kind of thing is nuts.

It’s a thing of beauty.

I was being lazier that I realised here. This was my original entry for today’s VloMo 09:

That was April ’08. Dylan’s quite a bit bigger now:

It’s 2.30am and I’m in the office with all three cats. Two of them will eventually find other things to do, but Dylan will hang here until I go to bed. He’ll follow me in and then he’ll be the one waking me up in the morning.

I guess he’s been my partner since day one.

But when I was looking for the above photo I found this old screen cap:

Turns out I’d posted almost exactly the same video to my Blip.TV account last year. I’d forgotten all about Blip, Viddler and the other video sites I played with back then. Good reminder for me to go back and grab those old videos. So I was about to pull the above redundant video when I heard a noise behind me and turning with my iPhone saw this:

So I guess that’s today’s entry for VloMo 09.

Everyone’s a critic. The notes he’s destroying are actually on Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat, which is somehow kinda…

…perfect.

Had lots of questions about the shot of Junior I revealed a few posts back, but I’m sorry. I can’t show you what happens next. Shush now.

Here’s my completely unrelated VloMo09 entry in which a couple of stunt men get thrown around a little bit:

The gun shot you hear is real. In that we had an armourer firing a real weapon on set. The actual gun you see was last used by Sean Connery.

The weird ass noise before the gunshot is just sound captured on the day, but the music is by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis taken from the movie Milano Trema La Polizia Vuole Giustizia (aka The Violent Professionals aka Rue De La Violence).

SOLD OUT – if I have any dropouts or manage to scare up some extra places I’ll let you know. Keep an eye on Twitter: @sizemore

I’ve been asked to get a few people together for a FREE screening of BUNNY AND THE BULL this Friday (6th November) around 6.30 in central London. I’ll confirm the venue later.

All you really need to know is that it’s from the director of THE MIGHTY BOOSH. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but people tell me it’s a lot of fun.

An extraordinary visual feast from the director of THE MIGHTY BOOSH, featuring the crème-de-la- crème of British comedy talent, including Noel Fielding, Julian Barrett and Richard Ayoade, BUNNY AND THE BULL follows Stephen (Ed Hogg), a heartbroken recluse who finds his mind hurtling back to a disastrous treck around Europe he took with his best friend, Bunny (Simon Farnaby), a dissolute gambling addict, as they embark on an extraordinary odyssey where his imagination is the only limit.

Journeying from the industrial wastelands of Silesia to the ball fields of Andalusia, their adventures bring them into contact with Hungarian dog enthusiast (Julian Barratt), a moustachioed matador (Noel Fielding) and a hot-tempered crab waitress (Veronica Echegui) who soon tests how far their friendship really goes.

Here’s the trailer:

And a scene from the movie:

I have 25 or so seats to fill so drop me an email: mikesizemore@gmail.com

First come first served I’m afraid, but please only get in touch if you’re sure you can make it.

Any drop outs will be abandoned on the TUNDRA. Cheers!

UPDATE: The director, Paul King, will be coming along on Friday to introduce the movie!

Seems I’ve been writing about everything but SLINGERS. Don’t worry – we’re still making a TV show. Couple more meetings happening in LA this week and as always I’m spending a few hours a day dropping the gang into some interesting scrapes via FinalDraft.

But seeing as I’m still waiting for the go ahead to share the finished sizzle reels with a few more people I figure a couple of stills won’t do too much damage.

Here’s Junior facing off against some security chaps:

Guess who wins.

Doubt that gives much away apart from the fact that we’re not filming this in SUPERMARIONATION.

Although I do have a few episodes of Thunderbirds on my iPhone at the moment…

I’m already a day behind with #VloMo09 which doesn’t bode too well for the future, but let’s give it a go anyway.

I was pulling some old photos from a drive last night and ended up duplicating a lot of files in iPhoto. As I sped through the stream to see what kind of mess I’d created it made for a nice cheap ass animation style that made me smile. So I screengrabbed the process from the entire drive and it came in at just over 20 minutes.

Way too long, but I think VloMo for me is supposed to be easy so I edited in my usual lazy ass way.

Rolling up random photos into a video made the Katamari Damacy theme a fitting piece of music to use. The version I chose was just over 4 minutes so I threw it into iMovie and cut the end of the video just as the music finished. Job done.

If I get really lazy again I figure there’s enough unused photo crap captured for another 2 of these. We’ll see.

If you look away from games and videos that carry those strobe warnings you may wanna sit this one out. Also there’s a fair bit of accidental subliminal marketing for that axis of evil Cafe Nero, the Church of Scientology and the Nazi party. Sorry about that.

The last theme this blog had featured a quote from Hunter S Thompson up front. Not one of the over used (online at least) quotes about drugs and alcohol or indeed anything from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. It was from a letter he wrote in 1990 and you can read the whole thing here. The part I quoted was this:

Suddenly I had my own gang. My own army, my people, my friends, my warriors… They came from all points of the compass and all points in time, and we stomped on the terra like champions. It was something to see, folks, and beautiful to be a part of…

When I first started this blog it was mostly me railing against the world. Complaining about the things and people that annoyed me. By the time I came to plant that quote up top I’d fallen sideways into social media and the focus of the blog changed somewhat. Sure, there was still a lot of complaining, but there was a lot more sharing too.

Those few lines of Hunter’s just sang to me when I reread them in Songs of the Doomed and it seemed important to wear them here like a badge.

I think the last year or so has taught me the real value of having like minded people to stomp on the terra with and I don’t think I need the same daily reminder of that. It’s still one hell of a quote though and it felt important to have it somewhere in the guts of the blog again.

The value in a writer like Hunter I believe is not just in his style. That’s proven every time I read something by some fuckwit who thinks mimicking his sentence structure while talking about a drinking problem puts them in the same camp.

What you take from Hunter is passion. Or to clarify that, his passion comes through so strongly that it makes you wish you cared about something in the same way. And when you put the books down for a moment you realise, of course, that you do. It’s why I read all his sports columns even though I didn’t give a damn about the teams or indeed organised sport of any kind.

Hell, it’s the reason I have the last line he ever wrote tattooed on my arm.

I guess that’s another reason why I don’t need the other quote somewhere permanent, like the header of my blog.

Skipped the normally mandatory Halloween post. My Bad. Spent most of yesterday trying to consolidate the external hard drives that pepper my office. Dug out a lot of old video I shot, a pile of movies I forgot all about and enough photos to put a little extra strain on Flickr’s ‘from Yahoo‘ hernia badge. They should really pop that back inside, out of sight, where it belongs.

Also found a pile of old bookmarks that I’m currently revisiting and feeding on. Figured the following pic managed to illustrate my previous two posts quite well so here it is:

Here’s the accompanying blurb from SADA104:

In the early 19th century, “Yamato Nadeshiko” (大和撫子) is referred to by Japanese as a ideal Japanese woman with loyalty, domestic ability, and wisdom in the male dominated society. Rin Nadeshico (*Nadeshico spelled with “c”, not “k”) is an up&coming Japanese female graphic artist who illustrates a new definition of “Yamato Nadeshiko” in the 20th century. Those girls she draws are independent, with strong personality, and sometimes aggressive.

Sadly, Rin’s site seems to be down, but there’s plenty of her work out there if you google her name.

In short: girls rock. Don’t fuck with them.

Right. November arrived on a wet windy Sunday. Luckily most of the Halloween vomit seems to have been washed away. November means novel writing for some of you, but I’ll be playing the video version again this year. 7pm and I’m in the middle of a Firefly marathon, but I’ll see if I can get something up by midnight.

Looks like last year I only managed a week’s worth of video. So that’s the target to beat. I’m also involved in a couple of side projects, but we’ll get to those when they pop up. I’m a big fan of Vimeo still, but I’m a bigger fan of the iPhone so that means I’ll be using YouTube more than normal.

Sorry about that.