Musing Pictures

Musing Pictures: The Grey

2012-01-31T15:03:00.002-05:00

I don't often like scary movies. Seeing "The Grey" last night, I came to understand my aversion a little better.

The film follows a dwindling group of air crash survivors as they battle the elements and a voracious pack of wolves in a cold, wind-swept arctic tundra. I'm usually drawn to these types of stories -- where a small group must overcome itself to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. This film was no exception: I wanted to get to know the characters, and I enjoyed following the power-structure shifts as various characters came to understand their weaknesses. But then, the wolves come, and the film falls in to familiar "jump out of the darkness" startle techniques. The wolves in the darkness are scary, and I don't mind that. But I hate being startled. Every time I'm startled, it reminds me that I'm watching a movie, and I lose that immersive feeling of being drawn in to the movie's world. In "The Grey", I noticed an additional detrimental effect: When the characters were merely talking, recalling their past, sharing their stories, instead of listening to them, I kept reminding myself not to get too drawn in, lest a wolf jump out suddenly and startle me again.

The parallel scene from a truly excellent scary movie is the scene from "Jaws" where the police chief, the scientist and the sea captain trade stories and get drunk in their boat. It's similarly structured: we learn about the characters, then the shark attacks. We've seen the shark already, and we fear the shark, but when the shark does attack, it's not a startling moment. A filmmaker's job in a scary movie is not just to scare the audience, but to shelter the audience when the audience should really be focusing on other things. Make us feel safe enough to listen, and then give us the characters and their story. If you want to undermine that sense of safety, do it with respect for what the safety is there for. If we don't feel safe ever, we won't allow the film to embrace us.

"The Grey" does borrow from "Jaws" in more successful ways. The idea of the danger being in front of us, obscured by a barrier that won't stop it, is ever-present. In "Jaws", the shark appears through the water without warning, so every time we see the water's surface, we fear the shark lurking beneath it. In "The Grey", wolves sometimes emerge from the haze of drifting snow, or from the pitch-black of an overcast night. We know that darkness is no barrier to the wolves. In "The Grey", both darkness and the fog-like snow are frightening for what might lurk just beyond. That Riddick film, "Pitch Black", works the same way.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: War Horse (2011)

2012-01-09T14:08:00.002-05:00

I've seen quite a few reviews and essays on "War Horse" that label it a "classical" or "old-school" film. Some reviewers love the film for this "traditional" tone. A few detractors find it trite, and (borrowing from much of academia's view of Spielberg) think of it as derivative, un-creative, perhaps even stale.

Critiques of Spielberg, in general, follow much the same lines, and they stem from an academic distrust that dates back to his earliest successes. Here's how it happened:

It all begins in France, in the years after World War II. French cinephiles who had been prevented from seeing American films by the Nazi occupation are suddenly awash in a half-decade of American cinema. The writers of the French New Wave discuss these films in a new, unusually intellectualized way, creating for the first time an academic discipline around the study of the motion picture.

Film Studies arrives in the United States in the '60s, when folks like Spielberg and Scorsese are just getting warmed up. Although film studies began with analysis of the Hollywood system, the primary interest of the academic field is in the films and movements that break Hollywood's rules. In Europe, French and Italian nationalist cinemas rise out of this academic movement in an effort to create distinct "styles" for their own nation's films. They break Hollywood's rules, and are rewarded by the attention of the academic world. They give film theorists more to write about.

In the '70s, a wave of independent film sweeps the US. Indie filmmakers take their cameras to the streets of New York City, churning out gritty, unusual content that challenges Hollywood's basic aesthetic rules. Their films are a gold mine for academic study.

And then there's Steven Spielberg, the guy who didn't really go to film school, who never really bought in to the academic's view, who makes films that don't obviously break any of Hollywood's aesthetic rules... whose work is boring to the academic who's looking for something juicy and obvious to analyze and dissect. And in 1975, Spielberg's "Jaws" becomes the world's top grossing film. The success of "Jaws", followed by the numerous other blockbusters in Spielberg's career, is a slap in the face to academic film studies. It proved the preferences of the academic film world irrelevant. Academia got bitter, and for the next three and a half decades, would either ignore Spielberg's films, or would dismiss them as "infantile" (as a professor of mine did, almost ten years ago).

What a lot of the academic world missed, and what some today are discovering, is that Spielberg's adherence to one particular rule blinded them to almost all of his cinematic innovation.

Classical Hollywood films were always made with a primary rule in mind: the apparatus of production must never be visible to the audience! If the lighting doesn't appear "natural", or if the camera movement draws attention to itself, it's pulling the viewer out of that dream-like state of being lost in the world of the film. It's making the viewer aware of the process, the machinery, and the mechanics. It interrupts the escape.

Many independent filmmakers broke this cardinal rule. To them, part of the fun of movies was to be able to recognize the machinery, to spot the silhouette of the man behind the curtain, so they made films that invited that kind of viewing. Academics, in turn, ate it up. After all, it's always easier to dissect those films that invite their own dissection!

Spielberg's films, on the other hand, do not "demand" analysis. On the contrary, they consistently draw viewers to fall in to their narrative spell. I remember my own early attempts to perform some academic deconstruction of a Spielberg film: I tried to identify visual motifs in the desert chase sequence in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). I had to watch the scene over and over and over again, because no matter how much I tried to pay attention to shot structure and composition, by the end of the scene, I was simply immersed in the film, watching a movie.

"War Horse" is a great film to consider in light of academia's attitudes. On the surface, it's a naiive, wide-eyed story, told in a straightforward, "traditional" way, with pretty images, plenty of Hollywood polish, and not much "art". Since it does not challenge its viewers to analyze it, academia will likely follow the usual trend and dismiss it as unworthy of a closer look.

But look closely, and it becomes an entirely different film. It is (as some critics have pointed out) a film that mourns humanity's use of violence, while at the same time celebrating humanity's potential for civility. Though it's called a "classical" film, it's a war film unlike any other -- there are no "sides" to take, no "good guys" or "bad guys" in the traditional sense at all. It is about as far from a "conventional" Hollywood narrative as you can get, but all the while, it maintains Hollywood's cardinal rule, immersing its audience in the world of the narrative, never allowing us to remember for a moment that we're in a movie theater, watching a movie.

Academia makes the claim (and it's a more complex and challenging claim than might seem at first) that cinema, at its best, is art. Though Spielberg blends his artistry with entertainment, I don't think of his work as any less artful, or of him as any less of an artist (in the cinematic sense) than Hitchcock, Ford or Keaton. In fact, I see cinema's primary goal as entertainment, much like painting's primary goal is decoration, rather than art.

Unfortunately, there are still too few in academia who are willing to view Spielberg and his films as anything other than the guy that keeps proving their theories of "great cinema" wrong. When that changes, I think there's a lot that film studies will gain from a thorough, honest and meaningful analysis of our era's master and his films.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Thing (1982

2011-12-29T23:55:00.003-05:00

I'm still watching "The Thing" (though I'm welcoming the distraction of writing about it at the same time -- I find horror films fascinating, but I hate feeling scared or anxious when I watch them!)

So, out of curiosity, I'm pondering the history of movie monster autopsies. In John Carpenter's film, they're pretty gruesome, but (so far), they don't seem to involve any major scares.

Perhaps I'm reminded of the autopsy on the alien creature in "Independence Day" (1994) which doesn't go so well, as I recall.

There's also, of course, the famous postmortem on a shark in "Jaws" (1975). Not the right shark, but still pretty gross.

Thinking back a bit earlier (to a film that is undoubtedly part of the ancestry of "The Thing"), "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) includes the slicing open not of an alien creature, but of the "pod" in which it gestates.

All of these scenes, in addition to the obvious "ick" factor, serve to underline the alien's "otherness", as if the strange exterior weren't enough to freak us out. In some cases, they serve to help us identify important weaknesses in the aliens, for when we finally do get a chance to beat 'em.

Are there other such scenes? I can't think of any directly, but there might be a few in films like "Men in Black", "Starship Troopers", etc. Know of any others, leave a comment!

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-25T19:33:00.003-05:00

There's a moment in "Tintin" that reminds me of a moment in Hitchcock's "Rear Window". (Perhaps I should warn of spoilers here, for both films, but this would be uninteresting if you haven't seen them, so see them first.)

First, in "Rear Window", the lead character solves a mystery by comparing slides (still images, photographs, frames) with what he can currently see from his window. He sees differences, changes that would not have been apparent if not for the sequence of stills. The character is a photographer, and he is metaphorically discovering the narrative power of the motion picture.

A lot has been written about this meta-cinematic expression in Hitchcock's film. Spielberg has an uncannily similar structure in "Tintin", where the hero, having finally found three mysterious parchments, discovers that when they are overlaid, one over the other, if held to the light, they reveal the coordinates of a long-hidden treasure. This is not representative of cinema in the classical sense, but "Tintin" is not a "film" in the classical sense, either.

Digitally constructed images (which make up the entirety of "Tintin", which is, effectively, a digitally animated movie) are almost always constructed in "layers". This is partially a throwback to techniques of cell animation, in which a background was painted on one transparent sheet, a character to be animated on another sheet, and any foreground on yet another sheet. The sheets would be stacked, and a photo would be taken. Then, to animate the character, the middle sheet (with the drawing of the character) would be replaced by the next drawing in the sequence. In this way, animators did not have to re-draw complex and detailed backgrounds for every frame of the film.

Digital animators do much the same thing, often with entire teams dedicated to each "layer" or component of a digital image. There are teams to build the digital "sets", teams to create and manipulate the digital "characters" (in the case of "Tintin", these teams included actors, whose performances were digitally captured to become another "layer" in the digital picture). Finally (and this is especially critical in 3D films, it seems), the stuff that floats by in the air is filled in -- dust, dirt, sand, seeds, or what have you. By layering these elements, a filmmaker forms the world, and by shining light through it (via the projector), it becomes the image that conveys meaning in today's cinema.

For Spielberg, the use of performance capture in a digitally animated film would have represented a tremendous shift from his typical tools. This is filmmaking without a camera. The entire approach to constructing such a film must is entirely different. The moment where Tintin overlays the parchments and discovers their secret is in the original story, but perhaps this is what drew Spielberg to this particular Tintin narrative? It's a metaphor for the very process Spielberg had to employ to make the film.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

2011-12-18T12:29:00.002-05:00

Although there has been much talk of the aesthetic shifts necessitated by the new rise of 3D, I haven't heard too many people discuss another recent techno-aesthetic shift to the same extent, though it seems just as prevalent as 3D these days.

"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" is in theaters this week, but not all theaters. It's playing only on extra-large IMAX screens. (I must disclose here that I do own a very small handful of IMAX stock. It'll never make me rich, but if I sell it, I'd be able to afford a TV for my living room)

An IMAX movie is not simply a blown-up, larger-than-usual projection of a regular movie (and if it is, you've been robbed, and you should get your money back). Typically, films projected in IMAX are shot (at least in part) on IMAX cameras and film stock, a larger film stock that can pack much more detail in to a scene (which means that the projected image, despite its size, is very sharp and vivid). The IMAX screen's aspect ratio is different (1.43:1, as opposed to most movies we see, which are anywhere from 1.78:1 to 2.35:1) (see: http://blog.bigmoviezone.com/?p=493 for details). Of course, IMAX is quick to point out that the sound system in the theater is also quite robust.

These are not trivial differences, not from the audience's perspective, nor from the filmmaker's.

The most dramatic difference to a filmmaker between shooting IMAX and shooting for a regular movie screen must be the change in aspect ratio. 1.43:1 is a narrower, more box-like image than the 16x9 "widescreen" TVs that we're all so familiar with these days, and much narrower than most Hollywood cinema formats. This has a huge effect on how scenes are framed and blocked -- where are the characters or objects positioned in relation to the frame of the image. Very wide aspect ratios are celebrated for the way even a close-up can include a distant horizon -- a close-up can sometimes take up only half the screen, after all (pick almost any point in "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" for examples). Square-ish images, like those seen on old TVs or even older movies (what was once called "Academy Ratio") tend to favor shots that include the entire figure -- where we can observe several people standing in conversation without feeling like we're very far away. Although the wider images seem more "cinematic" to us these days, there are plenty of fantastic movies from the first half of film's history that were shot in "Academy Ratio".

The IMAX aspect ratio, combined with the larger, finer film stock, are meant to provide viewers with an immersive visual experience. I'd be interested to speak with filmmakers who use the format about how it changes their approach to shooting their scenes. I also wonder how they approach the challenge of shooting a film for both IMAX and non-IMAX screens, where the aspect ratios are so different. The non-IMAX screens mush show cropped versions, where tops and bottoms of IMAX images are simply chopped off to re-frame scenes. This would take medium-shots and turn them in to close-ups, and it would take close-ups and turn them in to extreme-close-ups, changing the visual vocabulary of a scene, and perhaps affecting its impact dramatically.

The last scene of the film felt anemic and lacking in emotional resonance to me. It involved our central characters sitting around a table and saying the sorts of things that allow the narrative to resolve. I wonder how the scene plays out on non-IMAX screens, where it has been cropped to a wider aspect ratio. The close-ups are closer, which amplifies our characters' expressions and emotions. Does the scene falter because it's not an IMAX-appropriate scene? Because it isn't shot in an IMAX-appropriate way? Regardless, the visual "language" used on the screen felt wrong, somehow, disconnected from the content, which allowed the tone to slip and become trite and unconvincing.

That said, the film did maximize the IMAX format on a couple of occasions that really worked well. Both examples involved explosions, and utilized the extremely powerful sound systems that IMAX employs.

In one particular moment, famous now from the film's previews, the Kremlin explodes. The sequence is very, very short, and it begins with a deep, palpable vibration, a shock-wave, followed by the visuals of the building blowing up. Shock waves are neat, and they can provide for interesting visuals, but in this case, the shock wave is used not so much as a visual cue, but as an audio cue, and through that, as a physical, tangible, tactile cue. The rumble of the shock wave is so deep, it makes the entire theater shake. Timed with the shock-wave on the screen, the effect is mesmerizing, and true to the IMAX claims, totally immersive. The shock wave that we see on screen actually shakes the seat we're sitting in. It's not that it's a loud sound -- I didn't feel the need to plug my ears at all -- it's just deep and very, very powerful. There were a few other explosions in the film that achieved the same result using the same rumbling, physical sound. They helped to make tangible what the IMAX format is really capable of.

It's important to realize that IMAX is not simply a bigger screen with better speakers. It's a different exhibition format, and it demands, I think, a different cinematic approach. Filmmakers who make their films as usual, but slap them on IMAX screens to make a few extra bucks off the ticket premiums are cheating us. "Ghost Protocol" had its moments, and certainly seemed as though much of it was shot with the IMAX experience in mind, but there were some parts that didn't seem to fit. It's definitely worth seeing on an IMAX screen, but it doesn't feel like it's entirely an IMAX-worthy movie.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Tower Heist

2011-11-10T18:05:00.002-05:00

I recall 9th grade Jazz Band, the day we were so excited to get the sheet music to Lalo Schifrin's classic "Mission: Impossible" theme. Where a classical score might instruct the musician to play slowly or quickly, gently or harshly, Schifrin's score had a different instruction: "Driving".

We quickly learned the perils of 5/4 time. As listeners, it pulled us along. As players, it caught us off-guard. In both cases, we were used to the cyclical feeling of most popular music, wherein it comes in bursts of three or four (or six or eight) beats. Music in 5/4 is sneaky. You get to the fourth beat and expect a new phrase or musical moment to begin or repeat, but it doesn't. There's an extra beat that throws us off the musical trail, and only then does the next phrase or expression begin. Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" is another well known piece in 5/4 time. Five beats to the measure instead of four.

On screen, I find the effect mesmerizing. The music is at once aggressive, forcing its way past the expected starts and stops, and at the same time, elusive, hard to pin down. In "Tower Heist", the theme by Christophe Beck comes at us in 7/4 time, an even more complex extension of the 5/4 effect. In both cases, the music seems to infuse its visual element with momentum and determination. 5/4 doesn't stop at 4, but goes on to a 5th beat. 7/8 doesn't settle at 8 beats, but jumps to a new down-beat after just 7. This propulsive effect of 5/4 and 7/8 music makes it (to my mind) particularly effective in soundtracks and scores. And since the music is hard to "pin down", it becomes easier, to an extent, to allow the music to dissolve in to the scene, even if it's loud, blaring and brass-heavy (like that of "Tower Heist").

I don't know of many films with themes or scores that rely on 5/4, 7/8 or other unusual time signatures. If you know of more, please mention them in a comment here!

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Moneyball

2011-10-09T17:37:00.002-05:00

"Moneyball" is a movie about a statistics revolution in Baseball that reflects a similar seismic shift that has been occurring (albeit a little less suddenly) in the film industry itself.

The idea that statistics plays a role in baseball isn't new, but the idea that statistics have the power to define a winning season was shocking (as per the film) when it was first implemented a decade ago.

The prevailing idea was that certain types of players -- players who could individually strike gold in the ballpark -- were the catalysts for victory on a team. Teams with more money paid more for big names with flashy statistics, and somehow, that was thought to be the ticket to success for the franchise.

In Hollywood, that has been a dominant trend as well, starting with the studios' "star system" back in the silent era, a system that relied on the "star power" of an individual to draw audiences to see a factory product. Star Power eventually destroyed the old studio system, replacing it with the structure we see today, where stars negotiate individual contracts based on their public allure. Today, studios don't create stars. Stars (and their agents, managers, publicists, attorneys, etc.) create themselves.

Like Baseball, Hollywood has attempted to define success by individual numbers. Big stars are ranked by their "Q Score", a number that reflects an actor's previous box office success, and the market's trending relationship with that actor's work. On a broader scale, the Internet Movie Database's "Star Meter" has become a rough measure by means of which some actors and directors are measured.

Behind all this number crunching, though, there's an underlying anxiety: With playors, like movie stars, demanding bigger and bigger paychecks -- paychecks that the biggest franchises or studios are still willing to pay -- how is anyone else to compete?

That is the dilemma faced by the Oakland As in "Moneyball", and it's something I've wondered about quite a bit as an indie filmmaker.

The question becomes not what makes a good movie, but what makes a "winning" movie -- a movie that can recoup its investment, that can make a profit, that can compete with its larger, more thoroughly financed cousins.

"Moneyball", as a film, reflects this anxiety. It's a wordy, intellectual excursion through a very narrow, dry world of spreadsheets and statistics. It's the sort of film that an indie filmmaker might approach: few locations, no major special effects or stunts or action sequences, easy stuff. Of course, this film has clout behind it, too, so it doesn't look or feel like an indie film. Big stars populate the lead roles, after all (and they do a good job of it, too). So, is this an indie film, betting on story rather than flash to make its sales? Or is this a "Hollywood" film, banking on the Q-Scores of its stars to draw its audience? Is it the little baseball team with the roster of solid-hitting nobodies, or is it the flush-with-money franchise with the superstar athletes and promotional deals? Or is it both?

I see "Moneyball" as an interesting attempt to bridge the scaled-back sensibilities of indie filmmaking (keep it simple, keep it real, tell a dazzling story without dazzling effects, etc.) with the tried-and-true (and expensive) methods of the Hollywood system. Will it work? As far as I can tell, Hollywood is still going to churn out flashy, big-budget, big-effects, big-star blockbusters. But what about smaller films? Will they still try to mimic the big guns out there, or will the stories get smaller, simpler, more streamlined? A lot depends on how "Moneyball" plays these next few weeks and months. We'll see how their experiment works.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

2011-08-21T17:00:00.004-05:00

This Rupert Wyatt-directed reboot of the franchise made famous by Charleton Heston in the 1968 film (and several of its sequels) is a sophisticated, serious approach to what has become an iconic example of mid-20th-century camp.

I liked the movie, mostly for the fact that it took itself seriously, telling the story smartly, with a few nods to its predecessors (Caesar, the ape, builds a 3D model of the Statue of Liberty, and later, one of his captors watches Heston's version on TV), but without their unavoidable hokeyness.

Many of the sci-fi/fantasy films and TV shows from the '50s and '60s seem campy to modern viewers. It's interesting to ponder how much reactions may have changed over the years. To be sure, a monster pic like "Them!" (1954) was probably always campy, and was probably meant to be so. But what of "Apes"? Or the original "Star Trek" series? These are examples of material that seems campy, but which has been "re-booted" (an industry term these days) as much more noble material.

Was it possible to make a monster film in the '50s or '60s without making it campy? The technologies, effects and techniques of the time certainly didn't lend themselves to much seriousness. The apes opposite Heston were clearly people in monkey-suits (and Heston, well, he was Heston.) A decade later, George Lucas showed the world how to take those costumes seriously, by treating them as matter-of-fact, with the frankness of a contemporary documentary (see the "Cantina" scene in "Star Wars" (1977) for a wonderful example -- all of the creatures look like people in suits, but Lucas makes no effort to hide this, honoring our intention to suspend our disbelief, and letting the story lead us). But really, where was the serious sci-fi before then? (A side-note, of course, to mention Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), which remains a cinematic hapax legomenon)

This new "Apes", at once a re-boot for the series, and a re-make of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" (1972), exemplifies how far the degenerate genre has come in the past forty odd years. And as the genre matures, so do its stories, becoming more nuanced, more character-driven.

Of course, this doesn't mean that new adaptations of old, campy films always turn out well: See Peter Jackson's "King Kong" (2005) or Tim Burton's 2001 version for examples that failed to make contemporary sense of their source material.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-06T08:00:00.003-05:00

In the weeks and months leading up to the release of Michael Bay's latest metal-mashing blockbuster, much attention was given to the film's use of 3D. It was seen by many as a test of the new technology's ability to draw people to the box office. for the first few days of the film's release, it was shown exclusively in 3D, as if establishing a new format standard for the American Blockbuster.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the buildup was equally dramatic. Michael Bay and James Cameron appeared together at various events, cheering the format's aesthetic potential. Cameron, of course, gave 3D a serious commercial boost with his unbelievably successful "Avatar". He also worked closely with Bay on "Dark of the Moon", coaching him in the use of 3D technology.

It's the aesthetic side of 3D that interests me here, mostly because it doesn't really exist yet. 3D has been used as a fun gimmick for half a century, offering people a new way to look at what are otherwise perfectly two-dimensional movie images. Unfortunately, the aesthetic potential of 3D has barely been explored.

All the major technological innovations that brought change to movies have followed a rough pattern: 1: Experimentation, 2: Partial Incorporation, 3: Full Incorporation, 4: Aesthetic synthesis

An easy example to illustrate the pattern: Sound

Since the earliest days of motion pictures, filmmakers experimented with sound. There were all sorts of challenges to overcome, particularly the challenge of synchronization of sound to picture. Here's an example of what is believed to be the first (or, at least, oldest surviving) experiment by William Dickson.

By the mid-'20s, a profoundly successful Hollywood was ready to give sound a try. "The Jazz Singer" is basically a silent film with interludes of singing and a few scattered bits of dialog. The partial incorporation of sound proved wildly successful. Within three years, just about every movie theater in the United States was wired for sound, and most movies were "Talkies".

This initial incorporation of sound was hardly elegant. The first "All Talking" picture, a Warner Brothers film called "Lights of New York", is said to be a clumsy, lurching, artless film. Actors who hadn't had to speak a word were now expected to deliver lines. Noisy cameras that had been free to move about a scene were confined (at least, initially), to soundproof booths, so as not to disturb the sensitive microphones. Directors who had been used to shouting orders at their actors had to keep silent when the cameras rolled. The artistry that had been attained by silent films had to be put aside for the new gimmick, sound, to take hold.

It took a bit of time for the aesthetic synthesis of sound in motion pictures. Luckily, since radio had been around for a while, some techniques for using sound in narrative had already been developed. Filmmakers (including Charlie Chaplin!) began to utilize sound for more than just expressing the actors' voices. Sound effects (Fritz Lang's "M" is a great example of early, effective use of sound effects in narrative), musical underscores (such as the first true "soundtrack", the score to "King Kong"), and various recording techniques entered the picture in the 1930s. The key here was that filmmakers took responsibility for sound. It wasn't just a tool for capturing and conveying auditory performance, but a tool to create mood, to emphasize a setting, to inspire emotion, etc. Sound could be a part of the expressive fabric that makes film an art.

This is when sound terminology really took hold, and when connections between effect and meaning began to develop.

It's that last step that I'm looking for in 3D. so far, I've only seen hints of it. James Cameron's "Avatar" had one moment that stood out to me. The two lead characters, Jake and Neytiri, share a moment under a bio-luminescent tree. Little luminous pods float down from the tree and fill the air around them. Aside from being a beautiful scene, the three-dimensional effect contributes powerfully to a sense of being-in-the-space. It's not that we're looking at an object with a palpable sense of seeing something in the foreground or background. Somehow, the foreground and background become a dimensional texture through which we see the scene, and which envelops us as part of the scene.

In 2D terms, an establishing shot helps us situate the narrative, and a point-of-view shot helps us situate ourselves within the narrative. In 3D terms, the scene in "Avatar" situates the narrative around us. As far as I know, there is no term for this yet, no word or phrase to describe what's happening, but there will be one, as filmmakers, critics and academics try to understand the emerging aesthetic.

That's what I was looking for when I saw "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" in 3D. Are there any shots, sequences or scenes that illustrate some meaningful effect that 3D can achieve, but that 2D can not? To be honest, I can't pick any out. There were certainly some fun moments when I noticed the 3D, such as when the camera moves across foreground objects, following objects or characters in the middle-distance, but those moments were actually kind of distracting. Rather than making me feel like I was in the scene, they emphasized the effect, and my separation from it.

There's an irony here that is hard to overcome: The types of shots that most effectively demonstrate the "effect" of 3D are also the types of shots that are most detrimental to the power of 3D.

If we look at a character in a scene, and there is an object between us and that character, we become emotionally more distant from that character. Where there is nothing between us and the character, we ally ourselves emotionally with that character much more easily. Imagine any scene involving a job-seeker and an interviewer. The interviewer, who we aren't meant to like or relate to, sits across a desk. Often, the interviewer is shot in such a way that objects on the desk occupy the space between us. The job-seeker, on the other hand, is often shot with very few objects in the foreground. We are invited to participate in the job-seeker's anxiety.

Unfortunately, with 3D, the most "obvious" shot, or the shot that "makes the most of" the effect, is that in which the foreground moves before our subject. Often, it's the camera moving across a foreground object, keeping focus on its subject despite the interruption. The visual effect is superb: it really, truly does look like there is depth to the scene! But the emotional effect is terrible: rather than enveloping us in the space, the shot pushes us out, makes us outside observers in to the space.

If 3D, ultimately, is meant to bring us a step closer to "being in the movie", the kinds of shots that "celebrate" 3D need to be carefully modulated so as not to push us out in the process.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Lebanon (2009)

2011-06-15T12:44:00.002-05:00

For a few years, I have been taking note of films set in very few or limited locations. In particular, as I was gearing up to shoot "A Modest Suggestion", the study of limited-location films became aesthetic research ("AMS" takes place almost entirely in one room). Although I finished that film, I'm still learning what makes these kinds of movies work (when they work) or flop (when they fail).

"Lebanon", an intense and intimate war film, is a superb example of the limited-location narrative. It's powerful, exciting, and builds up its story with wave after wave of tension and release, all in the claustrophobic confines of a tank. "Lebanon" also confirms a pattern I've begun to notice in limited-location films: The best of them subtly remove us from the confinement of their primary setting, often without leaving the space itself.

In "Lebanon", much of the narrative takes place outside the tank -- encounters with other soldiers, enemy fighters, civilians, and the chaos of war. We don't see any of that from outside the tank, though. Instead, our perspective is that of the tank's gunner, as he looks through his scope. Without leaving the tank, we are brought in to the world just outside of its walls. In that way, the claustrophobic atmosphere in the tank remains with us, but we are given opportunities to experience the context as well.

Aside from providing us with this visual/spatial contextualization of the story, the shots through the scope serve an additional, perhaps less "artful" but no less important purpose: They keep the story from getting "boring". Although I believe that it is possible to contain an entire film within one space without coming up for air (see Hitchcock's "Rope"), it is still important to maintain a rhythm of sensory variation. An analogy: Repeat a word enough times, and it loses its meaning and becomes mere sound. In film, a location can lose its effect in much the same way. By taking us outside of the tank, "Lebanon" gives our spatial sense a moment to shake off the dust and reset itself, so that when we return to the tank, we are affected by it anew.

In his book "Making Movies", filmmaker Sidney Lumet discusses this when he writes about his one-room classic, "Twelve Angry Men". In that film, Lumet begins with high angle shots, and gradually brings the camera down, lower and lower, until we can see the ceiling in the film's third act. The effect is claustrophobic, but the variation in the way that we see and relate to the location is engaging. The room doesn't look the same, so we continue to feel its presence and its effect.

I would argue that Lumet does something else that keeps the narrative alive: He takes us entirely out of the location without taking us anywhere. Here, it's a more subtle transportation than our glimpses through the tank's scope -- we never actually leave the jury room. Instead, as the jurors discuss their case, they attempt to re-enact the murder as they understand it. They push furniture around, and imagine the door, hallway and staircase where the murder took place. In doing so, they invite us to imagine that space as well. Although we don't actually see the door, we're imagining it just as the jurors imagine it, and that in itself transports us outside of the jury room and in to a seedy apartment building.

Other limited-location films and even isolated scenes that take place in confined spaces tend to do this. In particular, I'm thinking of the scene in "Jaws" where Chief Brody, Hooper and Quint sit in Quint's boat, exchanging stories. Quint tells of his experiences on the USS Indianapolis, detailing its sinking, and the perils of its crew in the shark-infested ocean. The performance is arresting, and the story horrific. Spielberg, through the character of Quint, transports us to a world filled with sharks, hidden danger and terrible death. But we don't see a frame of it. The entire time, we're in the bottom of Quint's boat, listening to him speak.

"Lebanon" uses this technique as well. In a quiet moment, the tank's gunner tells a strange story of his adolescence. We are transported with him to the scene of the tale, but we never leave the tank.

I can't think of a limited-location film where all of the action is immediate, where no stories are told and no memories are brought up to transport us elsewhere. If such a film exists, and if it's any good, I'd like to see it.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Cronos

2011-03-28T10:47:00.002-05:00

An early film by the fascinating explorer of paranormal cinema, Guillermo del Toro, "Cronos" is a classic story, reimagined in a contemporary setting. Much as I enjoy del Toro's work, and much as I enjoyed the film, I did not expect to be floored by any of it... but I was.

There is one scene, about halfway through the film, in which the lead character, Jesus Gris, grapples with his inner demon in a public restroom. The scene is tense, unnerving, and as it unfolded, I began to notice that there had not been a cut in quite a while.

I've looked very carefully at some of Hollywood's famous long takes. There are several in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" (1957), with this particularly famous long-take opening. Hitchcock's "Rope" (1948) is an experiment of long takes. Of course, there's also the 92 minute long single-take film, "Russian Ark" (2002), which is a fascinating example of the technique, although there the take does not blend seamlessly in to the film... it IS the film.

I'm fascinated by the dramatic, tension-building possibilities of long-takes. They seem to be especially dramatic in small, tight spaces (as in "Rope", "Touch of Evil" (not the opening, but a later scene in a small apartment), and "Cronos").

Although cinematic cutting is used a lot these days to create tension in narrative, these long takes seem to suggest a very different meaning to the cut: a cut, it seems, actually relieves tension, rather than building it. By giving us a new angle, the cut propels us forward, whereas the long take forces us to observe at the camera's pace. It is relentless, deliberate, and in cases where it's used to good effect, the long take makes us hold our breath in anticipation.

Of course, it's not enough to simply put a camera down and let it roll. All of these great long takes rely heavily on the camera's movement within a scene to express the mood and flavor of the narrative. It's constantly moving between close-ups, wide shots, high angle, low angle, etc.

When I saw del Toro's long take in "Cronos", I almost missed it. It was only near the end of the shot that I began to wonder, "wait... when was the last cut?" I paused the film, rolled it back, and watched the scene again. In a way, that's the sign of a long-take that really works. Sure, we love the virtuosic openings of "Touch of Evil" and Altman's "The Player" (1992), but they stand out, they call attention to themselves. They're lots of fun, but they can only work at the beginning of a film, where they can't interrupt our immersion in the story because we haven't immersed yet. Mid-film long-takes need to be invisible in order to work in the context of Hollywood's "invisible apparatus" aesthetic.

Another shocker about this particular 'long-take' -- the entire thing runs under two minutes. By many standards, this isn't quite so long. Considering some scenes in some films have shots that run as short as 1/3 of a second, nearly two minutes is nothing to sneeze at. In addition, that this individual shot can convey on its own the tense development of an entire scene is remarkable in its own right.

In a way, the take in "Cronos" is a reminder that the contents of a shot can be precious. It's not just the cut that gives a shot its meaning, but performance, composition, movement, and all those details that come together within an individual shot can impress and move a viewer as well.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Inception

2011-03-01T09:05:00.003-05:00

Although it picked up several well-deserved awards at the Oscars this year, "Inception" has generally been overlooked by the Hollywood awards season. Here's an article that addresses this issue very well: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/is_hollywood_afraid_of_inception_original_ideas/#

That said, I'd like to take a moment to explain why "Inception" is a work of art worthy of much higher praise than it has been receiving.

I approach movies as art forms that entertain, or, conversely, as entertainment that is artful. This is the case with music, literature and theater as well. It's the reason I'm pursuing a Hollywood-style career, rather than a career in the "art film" world. Sure, there are plenty of Hollywood films that do not express any of cinema's artful side, but when it comes to the best stuff Hollywood can provide, the rare burst of imaginative collective genius that emerges from one or another of the big studios, it is always, invariably, both magnificent art and thrilling entertainment.

I'd rather not spend time defining art or entertainment here -- "What is Art?" is a question that has been awkwardly mulled by philosophers and theorists for thousands of years. We all seem to have a sense of it, but few honest thinkers have developed a clear definition. Entertainment is perhaps even more obscure, often relegated to a lower class of expression, and less commonly discussed in high academia. As such, few have ventured to come up with an effective, applicable definition of what it means for a piece or work to exemplify entertainment. But again, like art, there seems to be a general thread of unspoken understanding, certainly within cultures, perhaps between them, of what entertainment is.

I'd like to keep it basic: If people find a film entertaining, it has succeeded as entertainment. Art is a little trickier, but for film to be artful, it seems to fall in to at least one of two categories:

-Reflects the Viewer

-Reflects Itself

When a film reflects the viewer, or society, or humanity, it is in some way exposing or defining an aspect of who we are. Some films do this by simply telling a human story (Kramer vs. Kramer, When Harry Met Sally, etc.) They may have a clear message to convey, or they may be simply observations, but either way, the reflection is apparent. Even "Star Wars" is a profound reflection of our Western tradition, projected through a sci-fi lens. Sometimes the reflection is more metaphoric or symbolic (especially where animals, objects or fictional creatures play major roles) Since almost all films tell stories about people, they all seem to have this element of reflection to some degree. That said, some stories are shallow, either inaccurately reflecting us, or reflecting so shallowly that we barely recognize our silhouette. Not every attempt at art becomes a masterpiece.

Some films, in addition to reflecting their audience, express ideas and insights about themselves, or about film in general. These "meta-cinematic" expressions are usually buried beneath the narrative surface -- these films are rarely about movies. Classic examples come from Hitchcock, whose "Rear Window" can be read as a metaphor for the narrative triumph of cinema over the still image (the mystery is solved only when Jimmy Stewart's character compares a photograph of a flower bed to the flower bed's current appearance -- one photo isn't enough, but a sequence of images can tell a story). Hitchcock's "Vertigo" also carries a meta-cinematic theme, exploring the relationship between the viewer (symbolized again by a Jimmy Stewart character) and the unreachable Viewed (Kim Novak's character). More recent films have explored meta-cinematic themes, as well. Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" poses a heavy critique of cinema's power in a scene where Nazi officials and dignitaries sit in a movie theater, enjoying a propaganda film. We see the screen in the movie like they see it, and in the process, we, too, sit in a theater, allowing ourselves to be moved by what we see on a screen.

I'm fascinated by films that express these meta-cinematic qualities. A professor of mine once suggested that every work of art has within it the keys to its own self-analysis, but some make their self-analysis more accessible, defining their self-reflexive message more clearly than others.

"Inception" falls in to this category of self-reflexive, meta-cinematic films. It tells the story of a group of specialists who create and manipulate dreams. This group of dream-makers typically provides dreams in order to extract information from the dreamers -- that is to say, the dreamer can remain passive while this team roots around in his mind.

They must make these dreams believable, providing the bare outlines, and allowing the dreamer to fill in the details. The more the dreamer is allowed to fill in the details, the less likely the dreamer will notice he's dreaming.

As a metaphor for cinema, this is very clear. The dream-makers are filmmakers, pulling together the elements that make a movie -- they provide locations, characters, and individual shots. But they know that ultimately, it's the movie-watcher, like the dreamer, who must piece those elements together to form a contiguous story.

To understand this, imagine any movie conversation between two people. The structure for this typical conversation is so ubiquitous that we've learned not to notice it at all. First, we see both characters. They're facing each other, and we can see much of the space around them. Then, we cut in to a close-up of one character. Then, a close-up of the other. Then, back to the first, etc.

When we see only one character on the screen, where's the other character? What about the rest of the room? Without actively thinking about it, we complete the space around the character in close-up. Without seeing it, we sense the entire space, and the other character that inhabits it. We fill in the details.

So, movies and the engineered dreams in "Inception" are metaphorically linked. At this point, the narrative pushes us to another level. The big challenge for the dream-making team in the film is to create a dream in which an idea is implanted, rather than extracted. The goal is to inspire action in the dreamer, to get the dreamer to do certain things once he wakes up. This is much more difficult than extraction of ideas because the dreamer needs to believe the implanted idea is originally his own.

Great movies have the power to move us beyond their running-time. Great filmmakers inspire us to think, to act, to change the way we interact with the world. But to do so, they must strike a careful balance, or their film will come across as "preachy" or "a lecture". If we recognize that we are being called upon to act, we turn against the message, push back.

By creating this strong parallel between dreams and films, "Inception" becomes a movie about our experience of watching movies, and as such, it becomes a film about filmmakers, who are the dream-makers of our world.

So, now that we know we can be so influenced by cinema, what are we to do about it? Can we trust the dream-makers? Should we be more skeptical? What about Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed "Inception"? Who is he to me that I should let him in to my mind?

The dream/cinema parallel runs very deep in "Inception", and a full analysis of it would take many more words than what I've roughly outlined here. It is one of the most thorough, most self-aware examples of self-reflexivity in a motion picture that I've seen in a very long time.

It is also a very entertaining film, as evinced by its extraordinary box office success, and by the fact that so many people returned to see it more than once (myself included).

When I left the theater after seeing it for the first time, I felt quite strongly that "Inception" exemplifies Hollywood's magnificent potential. It is a work of art, deeply layered with meaning, that entertains in the tradition of the greatest Hollywood adventures. It is the sort of film that only Hollywood could produce -- its scale and scope are huge, production values high, and texture extremely clean and polished. It is at once a factory product and an individually envisioned work, mass-entertainment and inward-looking art.

Can any other film this past year make such a claim? How about the past five years? Ten? I'm not so sure. That is why "Inception" stands out, to me, as being worthy of much more attention than it has already received.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Avatar

2009-12-30T18:52:00.002-05:00

Though the film itself lacks a certain degree of depth and complexity, James Cameron's "Avatar" is the strongest argument in a while for a shift in focus when it comes to Hollywood cinema.

I was fortunate to catch "Avatar" on an IMAX screen in 3D. (full disclosure: I own roughly 15 shares of IMAX stock). The film has been made available to audiences in several other formats, including two "regular" 3D formats, and a "flat" version for traditional movie screens. It follows several recent blockbusters (including the latest in the "Harry Potter" franchise) which were also released in 3D and IMAX 3D formats. This 3D trend is not entirely new, nor is it entirely original.

In the '50s, 3D first emerged as a way to compete with the emergence of television and other factors that cut in to ticket sales. At the time, the technology was very rough - projectors were known to malfunction, and enough viewers complained of headaches that the process was temporarily abandoned.

the '70s brought new technology to the realm of 3D films, as well as new challenges to Hollywood in the form of the VCR. Again, Hollywood included 3D in its arsenal to win back audiences, and although new technologies virtually eliminated the headaches and the projection glitches, 3D did not catch on. There were many theories as to why this might have happened. Some suggested the glasses were uncomfortable. Others thought that perhaps theaters didn't want to have to deal with the extra process of handing out and then collecting those glasses from every customer. Whatever it was, it killed 3D everywhere outside of theme parks and state fairs.

Now, Hollywood is faced with some of its biggest challenges: People are watching plenty of movies, but they're watching them at home, on television or on DVD, which places several additional barriers between the studio and its profits. To lure people back to the theaters, Hollywood has produced a decade's worth of giant films, high-budget special-effects spectaculars that audiences could only expect to appreciate on giant screens. That seems to have worked, somewhat. For the first time since World War II, US ticket sales have increased. But Hollywood is paranoid, perhaps rightly so. As the films have gotten bigger, to require bigger screens, so, too, have televisions grown. Home-viewing technology is hot on Hollywood's tail.

And so, again, we have a cycle of 3D movies. Will it stick? Will the cinematic landscape take to this change, or will it fall back on the simplicity of two-dimensional production once the fad dies down?

Perhaps the biggest potential contributor to a more resilient wave of 3D movies is the technology behind "Avatar" -- whereas 3D films were once shot with complicated two-camera rigs, new 3D films are shot on cameras such as the "Pace Fusion 3D", shoulder-mountable digital cameras that can match the flexibility and maneuverability of a prosumer digital video camera, but can shoot it all through the two lenses required for 3D production.

That, in itself, does not make "Avatar" unique -- other films have utilized these cameras. I suspect that their versatility will come in to play much more actively on the sorts of films that follow "Avatar's" giant footsteps. By being such a highly anticipated film, "Avatar" could convince theater owners to add 3D infrastructure to their theaters, thus expanding the potential reach for smaller, more modest 3D productions.

Now that the technology for relatively low-budget 3D production is becoming available, the final element required for 3D to take hold is more of an embrace of 3D on the part of theatrical distributors and exhibitors. If they're willing to show 3D content, more of that content will be created, and we'll be wearing glasses to many more films. A strong theatrical run for "Avatar" (and especially a strong run for its 3D screenings) would be all it takes. If the numbers add up, theaters will be happy to show more 3D fare. If "Avatar" can prove that 3D is a profitable way to shoot things, it'll enter the mainstream in ways that could not have happened otherwise.

So, what does it take for "Avatar" to demonstrate the profitability of 3D? Well, every time you hear someone recommend that it be seen in 3D, you're hearing a part of that process at work. The film's narrative is very thin, full of cliches and uninspired plot points. But the world woven by the film's creators is exceptionally rich, vividly painted, and entirely absorbing. Seeing the film in 3D is a powerful immersive experience. The appreciation of this experience is reinforced by the plot's own meta-commentary. In the film, humans on a remote planet connect themselves to genetically constructed alien bodies -- they are able to control these alien bodies, to walk around and speak through them. They can experience this alien planet from within the body of an alien -- as if they're right there, among the trees. When the lead character says about the experience, "this is great", he is priming us, giving us the words that will paint our experience. Our experience of seeing this planet as if we're right there, among the trees.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Coraline

2009-12-13T17:58:00.003-05:00

There's something very basic about Neil Gaiman's stories that speaks to me whenever I encounter one. I was first introduced to the storyteller's work in high school, when I read the "Sandman" series of graphic novels. Gaiman is a consistent reinventor of myth, letting the stories, characters and structures of folklore, religion and mythology inform and occasionally populate his very contemporary fiction.

There was a moment in "Coraline" (which is based on a Gaiman novel) when this mythic consciousness struck me. The title character (voiced by Dakota Fanning) recently moved with her parents to a large, strange house. She is sent at one point to meet her quirky new neighbors, which she does with some reluctance. The neighbors, of course, serve the very familiar purpose of providing Coraline with both a context and information about her pending ordeal. They play a role that is unabashedly classical -- lifted right out of an ancient myth or well-worn folktale. And it's immediately obvious, too. Neither the film nor the narrative that precedes it attempt to mask what critics might call "formulaic" turns of the story. But this is what I like about Gaiman's stories -- he is a master of formula. What I mean by this is not that his work is flawed by formula. On the contrary, Gaiman is one of the rare storytellers who knows the power of formula, cliche, and the patterns of mythic narrative. He knows how to incorporate these patterns in ways that are new and refreshing, but also deeply and profoundly familiar. That profound familiarity is something that too few artists consider when creating their work. There is such a heavy focus on "originality" these days, and the result, more often than not, is shallow. Gaiman's originality is very liberated -- his work is full of some of the most creative, inspired images and ideas I've come across in contemporary literature. But that originality is grounded firmly, its roots intertwined with the full scope of narrative history, which is the history of how we tell our stories, of how we reflect on ourselves.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Counterfeiters (2007)

2009-11-30T16:06:00.002-05:00

There is something that makes me uncomfortable about "The Counterfeiters", and it has something to do, I think, with what makes it a powerful film. The Austrian/German co-production, released in 2007, is another link in a two-decade-long chain of Holocaust films
. This time, the focal point of the narrative is Operation Bernhard, a Nazi economic warfare project, and Salomon Sorowitsch, the expert counterfeiter who is tasked with making it work.

In some very clear ways, the film (like all Holocaust film since 1993) is a response to Spielberg's "Schindler's List". In that film, a non-Jew (Schindler) shows us (the identity-free public) that we, too, can make a significant difference in the lives of those around us. As individuals, we can be tremendously powerful.

The tone in "The Counterfeiters" is rather different. Salomon (to him, being Jewish is little more than a coincidental nuisance) shows us the path of least resistance. To get out of work details in Mauthausen, Salomon agrees to paint portraits and propagandistic murals for the Nazis. When he is brought in to run Operation Bernhard, he is tasked with the creation of what could have become the war's most catastrophic economic weapon: the counterfeit US Dollar. Again and again, Salomon is challenged about his willingness to work on the Nazi project. His response is always a selfish emphasis on his own desire to live another day. He does not express concern for other Jews, nor does he see himself as a 'Jewish' victim -- he was arrested, after all, for counterfeiting, not for being Jewish. When Salomon finds out that a member of his counterfeiting team is sabotaging their work, he refuses to name names, to identify the saboteur, but not because of a Jewish or ideological allegiance. It's a part of the criminal's code of honor - you don't rat out your fellow criminal. (this code of honor appears in German films as far back as Fritz Lang's "M" (1931))

It is clear, in the end, that the hero of "The Counterfeiters" is not Salomon, but the saboteur in his ranks, the man who risked his life to prevent the Nazis from getting their hands on this potent piece of economic warfare. But we aren't ever expected to see ourselves in the hero's shoes. We identify with Salomon.

Perhaps that's a hard pill to swallow. After we saw the film, my wife turned to me and asked, "what would you have done?" It's not an easy question to answer. Would I have quietly aided the enemy in order to survive another day? Or would I have died making a grand statement against them? The American version of the Holocaust features the grand self-sacrifice, and celebrates those who took tremendous risks to save others around them. But what about those who took tremendous care to save themselves? How are we to view them? I'm not so sure. All I know is that this film tells just such a story, asks just such a question, and leaves it to us to find our own answers.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Waltz with Bashir

2009-10-29T16:37:00.005-05:00

I have occasionally explored the challenges of historical depiction in this blog, particularly in the context of depictions of the Holocaust on screen. "Waltz with Bashir", the Israeli contender for last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, addresses these challenges openly.
To remind you: historical depictions on film, especially 're-enacted history', are never the same as the experience itself. As a re-teller of history, a filmmaker must decide between historical accuracy and emotional impact.
We have seen how "Schindler's List" depicts a fictionalized version of a Holocaust that really happened, with an emphasis on transcending the history to achieve an emotional impact for those who were not there to feel it directly. We have also seen how "Inglourious Basterds" represents a fictionalized version of the Holocaust that did not happen, freely transforming fiction in to emotional memory.

"Waltz with Bashir" takes yet another approach. The narrative that the film presents is not only a historical narrative, but it is woven out of memories of the people who were there. The film is structured and presented like a documentary. There are interviews with various people who experienced first-hand Israel's war in Lebanon in the early '80s. There is footage from the field. There are sections that would be called 're-enactments' had this been a History Channel special. But this is different in a profound way. In "Waltz with Bashir", the interviews are animated. They are cartoons, roughly sketched impressions of the people whose experiences the film recalls from the depths of memory. Perhaps more significantly, the glimpses we are provided of the war itself are interwoven animations of both direct recollections of the war and remembered dreams and visions. The film opens with what turns out to be a dream sequence, recalled by a friend of the filmmaker's, twenty years after the war. We see the dream, then the conversation in which it comes up. At one point, someone points out that dreams and visions are real - they may not be literal, but they carry truths within them that history books do not.

So, the film treats the ravaged memories of war with as much or more seriousness as the sanitized records of history. Although the film revolves around the filmmaker's search for his own memories, and for the truth behind them, the ultimate lesson is that the most painful memories themselves can be suppressed, and the only key to unlocking their secrets is to treat them as a part of the history itself.

Ultimately, "Waltz with Bashir" is an ode to subjective memory. In a world of objective documents, films and photographs that 'prove' events, a film that could have visually differentiated between historical fact and imagined dream represents them on equal footing. Dreams, memories and history share a format. We can not sort them out because they are all equally a part of the events they describe.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-16T12:41:00.002-05:00

In the context of the trend I referenced in earlier posts (more films about aging in this new retirement boom era), a mainstream film about a child's maturation makes for an interesting counterpoint. "Where the Wild Things Are", Spike Jonze's adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak children's book, is at once a celebration of a child's imagination, and a cautionary tale about growing up too soon. In his imaginary world, the film's central figure, Max (Max Records), is crowned king, and learns, over time, that leadership is far more than parties and grand plans. When he falters and fails in his grown-up role, he returns to his childhood a bit more grateful for it.

There are, of course, many films about kids growing up. For decades, this was Hollywood's dominant theme, from the baby boom to generation X. Children were urged not to grow up too fast, and grown-ups were urged to re-discover their inner child (the Tom Hanks film, "Big"(1988) is perhaps the neatest encapsulation of this idea).

Looking at these two themes back-to-back -- the wish for a safe and happy childhood versus the need for a noble and dignified old age -- makes me realize just how similar they are. Both involve a person's progression from one distinct stage of life to the next. With childhood, the future is embraced, but often it does not embrace back. As for old age, that future is feared and shunned, but it can not be avoided. In one case, a return to childhood is seen as laudable, but also as an all-too-brief reprieve from the harrowing experiences of the real world. In the other, a return to pre-elderly life is dangerous, irresponsible, and often fatal.

Ironically, with the economy where it is, many retirees are forced to work, to earn a bit more money in order to keep themselves afloat. Our films seem to be urging them on to a noble, quiet, peaceful denouement, but our economy is dragging them back, ill-equipped, to their prime.

How will this cultural dilemma manifest itself in the cinema of the next few years? Which way will the movies push our retiring parents? Will they realign with the needs of a tough economy, or will they present the idyllic, peaceful, retirement that they have begun to suggest?

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Wrestler

2009-10-16T09:09:00.002-05:00

A brief observation that Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" (2008) is yet another film in the very recent wave of films about growing old. Specifically, it is a film that explores the tension between the dignities and indignities of growing older. Whereas other films seem to evoke a certain noble resignation to old age (characters coming to peace with their weakening bodies and lengthening lifespans), this film depicts that dignity and its loss, as the central character (Randy "The Ram" Robinson, earning an Oscar for Mickey Rourke) tries to accept his slow disintegration, and eventually gives up, refusing to "act his age", stubbornly clinging to a youthfulness that his body can no longer sustain.

It is perhaps not surprising that the film is about a man who does not successfully transition to elderliness -- the film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, whose other films (including "Pi" (1998) and "Requiem for a Dream" (2000) dwell deeply in to the failures of their central characters.

Hollywood once taught us that youth, even in old age, was king. Grandparents who learned how to play again were the ones we cheered, the ones we applauded for. Now that audiences are older, we're looking at age slightly differently. The heroes are those who can climb up and out of the prime of their lives, to a dignified, self-assured sunset. I imagine this new view will dominate much of cinema over the next decade. We'll see how it then transforms our culture (when life starts imitating the art that imitates it)

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Psycho (1960)

2009-10-15T12:48:00.002-05:00

I recently took the time to watch this classic Hitchcock thriller again, in the context of a screenwriting course I'm taking at Hopkins. I won't write much on it, since so much has already been written, but I'd like to focus on one scene.

Early in the film, Marion crane steals forty thousand dollars from her employer, and skips town. After driving West through the desert for several hours, she pulls over to the side of the road, to catch a bit of sleep. In the morning, she is woken up by a startling knock on the window. A police officer has a few questions for her.

The scene is very suspenseful, but unlike other moments in the film which generate suspense through subtle and often subconscious manipulation, this scene's suspense emerges out of a very clear dissonance between perspectives.

I've written elsewhere about Hitchcock's particular methods of inspiring suspense, but it's a topic that is always worth exploring. It's not for nothing that he is known as the "master of suspense", after all.

This particular scene contains three perspectives, or subjective points from which it is seen. Marion, of course, provides one, and the police officer provides another. The third, of course, is our own, as the detached-yet-engaged audience, observing the scene without being within it.

Marion's mind seems fairly clear to us. She must be nervous, and her reaction to the officer betrays her fears of being followed, or of being caught. We don't know what the officer is thinking (the windows to his soul, his eyes, are obscured by very dark sunglasses). Marion must be feeling a lot of guilt. The arrival of a police officer inspires her first to start the motor of her car. It is only a moment later, once she has come out of her sleep a bit more, that she realizes that he's not necessarily there because of the money she stole, and she plays along (albeit nervously).

Our perspective tends to follow Marion's. We see much of the first act of the film through her point of view. Her initial panic is our initial panic. But we can see the scene from outside of her car. We can see that she's parked quite unusually on the side of the road, and that as such, there's another reason for the police officer to be there. We can see before she does that if she stays calm, and says the right things, she can survive the encounter.

We feel this, so we don't quite share Marion's panic, but we also don't know for certain that the police officer isn't a threat. On the contrary, when Marion behaves suspiciously, we recognize the suspiciousness of her behavior, and are made uneasy by the police officer's unchanged expression. Did he notice? Did he pick up on anything? We pick up on the slip-ups because we know Marion is guilty of theft. We are made uneasy by the police officer's apparent lack of response. This sets us on edge, and lays the groundwork for the scene's most suspenseful aspect.

Because we can see Marion's mistakes more clearly than she can, it is natural that we would want to warn her about them, or at least to reprimand her for slipping up, so she doesn't do it again. It's the "no, don't say that!" or "don't do that!" sensation. Since we can not actually reach in to the film to affect Marion's behavior, we are left biting our nails, hoping she figures it out herself.

By the end of the scene, Marion is driving away, but since the police officer's face remains impassive, we are still left with the question of whether or not her escape is complete. On one hand, we wished just a moment ago that we could reach in to the film and warn Marion to watch her words and actions, and on the other hand, we're now left without enough information to know if there's a need for caution or not. Over the course of the scene, we're shuttled back and forth between knowing what the danger is without being able to address it, and being on that fine razor's edge between the dangerous and the safe.

When watching Hitchcock films, it's often worthwhile to track what we, as viewers, know over the course of the film. The dissonance between our observations and the observations of the characters with which we identify is at the heart of Hitchcock's scheme. He was named "Master of Suspense" because of his keen understanding of how to balance the delivery of these two types of information.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Informant!

2009-09-30T07:31:00.002-05:00

A brief thought on this nice little film from a filmmaker whose career I envy (in the best way, of course). Steven Soderbergh's story is set in the early and mid '90s. As such, it should be considered a 'period piece'. This is one of the first times that I've watched a 'period piece' and recognized the period being depicted as one that I've experienced first-hand. Until now, I've thought of films in three categories: First, there are those films that don't take place in a version of our real world -- fantasy films, some sci-fi, etc. Second, there are those films that take place contemporaneously with their production (so, a film set in the '50s that is made in the '50s is not a period piece, even if it might seem like one today). Third, there are period pieces -- films set in our world, but in a different era (be it past or future). Those are films that must both weave a compelling image of a world, but tie it so thoroughly to our reality that we can imagine them as being a part of the continuum of our history. Each of these categories can be sub-divided further, of course, but it's that third category that intrigues me. After seeing "The Informant!", it occurred to me that there are three kinds of period pieces -- films that re-create a past (or future, arguably) beyond recollection (films that take place in the middle ages, for example, or in the 19th century), and films that re-create a relatively recent past, one that can be remembered and reminisced about. This distinction is an interesting one because it is partially subjective. A film set in 1969 may be within the scope of memory for some viewers, but it depicts a world that other viewers have never experienced, and therefore, can not remember. One kind of film is full of interesting historical details (the roller-skating telephone operators in "Changeling", for example), meant to evoke in us not a memory, but a sense of wonder at the way of life that once was. The other kind is full of those details that are meant to evoke recognition and memory (the large cell phones, black-and-green computer screens, and boxy cars of "The Informant!") I think it would be interesting to look at films about the '90s that are made by people too young to remember that decade. It'll be a while before that happens, but I wonder what the differences will be between the depictions of the generation that remembers and the generation that re-creates.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Surrogates

2009-09-30T06:36:00.002-05:00

I was fortunate to catch an early screening of Jonathan Mostow's "Surrogates" late last week. I had heard very little about the film, and as such, I could see it with a rare, open mind. The film plays on ideas established early in film's history: People are not necessarily who they appear to be -- all the more so when technology paints their mask. This classical sci-fi concept comes up in Fritz Lang's classic, "Metropolis", a German silent film from 1927. In "Metropolis", an inventor (C.A. Rotwang, played by Gustav Frolich, perhaps the original mad scientist) creates a robot in the image of a beautiful woman (Maria, Brigitte Helm). Maria is to be a sort of savior to the masses, but her doppelganger is meant to bring about their demise. The idea is very deeply cinematic -- in film, actors pretend to be other characters, and we accept the conceit, especially if it is done particularly well. Since we accept the conceit, we can believe that the characters in the film are justifiably fooled by similar imitations. After all, if we fault them for not seeing the truth behind a character's mask, we must also fault ourselves for seeing the characters and not the actors.

In a film that borrows heavily from "Metropolis", "Blade Runner" (1982, Ridley Scott) explores similar themes. Here, though, the imitation-humans are not designed to be re-creations of living people. On the contrary, they are so life-like, it is as if they have personalities and identities of their own. Where Fritz Lang's film is about the differences between the robotic/technological and the human/organic, Scott's film is precisely opposite -- it is about how inhuman humans can be, and about how much our technology can define our very humanity. In Scott's film, there are no clear distinctions between human and humanoid. Even within the film, characters have a hard time distinguishing between robotic and real. The effect works, because we can't make the distinction, either. After all, the characters are played by real people, regardless of the character's internal mechanisms.

To re-frame this: In "Metropolis", we see a good (human) and an evil (robot) version of the same character. We know the difference between the two because they behave differently, although their appearance is the same.
In "Blade Runner" we see human humans and robotic humans, and we can not tell the difference, which is precisely the point.
That brings us to "Surrogates", where real people control robotic versions of themselves, through which they experience life. Much like in "Blade Runner", no one is to be trusted -- people's 'surrogates' are not necessarily identical to the controllers themselves. This is established early on, when a beautiful woman turns out to be a robot controlled by an obese man. Whereas in "Blade Runner", the primary question to a character is "what are you?", "Surrogates" begs the question, "Who are you?" It's a "Mission: Impossible" scenario that includes and make suspect the identity of almost everybody.

Ultimately, all of these are attempts to explore what makes us human. Is our humanity our compassion ("Metropolis"), our substance ("Blade Runner"), our persona ("Surrogates")? As narrative devices, these all work because of the way we see movies. We see characters as people -- we see their performances, and extrapolate from them entire lives, backgrounds, personalities. When a film moves us, it is because we have been able to recognize humanity in the pattern of flashing lights and sounds that have danced before us. That is part of what makes movies so powerful: through film, we can be made to recognize reality on the surface of a screen.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Inglourious Basterds

2009-09-06T19:01:00.002-05:00

'Holocaust revenge fantasy' is not a genre to be taken lightly. Very few films and very few filmmakers have ventured far in to this territory in the past, and certainly, no mainstream film has entered so deeply as "Inglourious Basterds." This latest film from director Quentin Tarantino ("Pulp Fiction", "Kill Bill", etc.) has received primarily positive reviews, and a healthy box office run. It has also generated a great deal of discussion, particularly surrounding its treatment (or re-treatment) of the history and horror of the Holocaust.

The film begins with an odd twist: an instantaneous blending of two genres. On the screen, text informs us: "Once upon a time, in Nazi-occupied France..." It is fairy tale and history, fiction and fact, a story where the good guys win, and a story where the ending is dispassionate. Immediately, Tarantino alerts us to the fact that what we are about to see is both far from and rooted in reality.

This dichotomy is always present and extremely important in cinematic fictionalization of historical events. Every historical re-telling must acknowledge its fictional side, or risk being seen as a mere story. Holocaust narratives require this all the more, because they are almost universally stories of individual tragedy and individual triumph, set in the context of human catastrophe. Holocaust stories can never convey the full scope of the Holocaust literally, so they resort to metaphor, ellipsis, and other devices to indicate those ideas that are beyond literal depiction. The girl in the red dress in "Schindler's List" stands in for the victims of the Holocaust who could never be fully depicted in the film.

Tarantino's Holocaust narrative does something unexpected with this approach. Instead of trying to tell a true story as a metaphor for or a window in to the broader Holocaust, he creates a very obviously fictional, fantastical story. We know (because we are told, and because we can discern) that the events portrayed in the film never happened. We also know, though, that behind the narrative lies some sort of strange truth. We don't get a history lesson comprised of facts, but we do get something more visceral.

The film's first sequence involves an interrogation between Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer. Landa is known in France as the "Jew Hunter", and he is on the scent of a local family he believes is hiding in the farmer's care. Landa is always polite, a seemingly pleasant, happy man. Over the course of the conversation, it becomes apparent that he is much more nefarious, and by the end of the scene, Landa's easy smile shows us just how evil he actually is.

It is easy to imagine such a scene playing out in the French countryside in the early days of the Nazi occupation. But Tarantino isn't interested in the accuracy of the moment. Over the course of the conversation, several small things happen to remind us that we are watching something other than historical re-enactment. At one point, the farmer has pulled out his pipe, and Landa asks permission to smoke his own pipe. When the farmer gives his permission, Landa pulls an enormous, outlandish, out-of-place pipe from his pocket. The effect is almost cartoonish, something more at-home in "Mary Poppins" than a Holocaust film. But it becomes a part of what Landa stands for, what he represents. Landa is a character we are meant to hate, and we are meant to understand that he is there representing an arrogant, boastful, self-confident, and totally evil aspect of the Third Reich itself. In "Schindler's List", concentration camp administrator Amon Goeth is purely evil, but he represents a very specific historical figure who himself was a part of a much larger operation. Landa, because his character is represented with these un-realistic elements, represents not a real person, but something much bigger.

Perhaps to put it in a different context, "Inglourious Basterds" represents itself as a sort of fairy tale. In fairy tales, the Big Bad Wolf is not a character meant to represent a real, historical wolf, but is rather a stand-in for the wolfish dangers of the world, the predatory sadism and greed that children (particularly children) must be wary of when out in the world (which is, itself, represented by the woods, the forest, or wherever it is that the wolf lurks).

By setting itself in this very fictional framework, "Basterds" achieves through playfulness a greater sense of Nazi evil than do other films through gory, heartbreaking realism. At the end of "Schindler's List", "The Pianist", or any of the past twenty years' worth of mainstream Holocaust films, we find ourselves very sad, perhaps even in tears, shocked by the enormity of the loss of life, the loss of humanity that the Holocaust's victims endured. It is rare that we come away from such films feeling more anger and disgust at the Nazis than sorrow for their victims. In "Basterds", we really, really hate Nazis.

Interestingly, Tarantino accomplishes this feat with very little depiction of what the Nazis did. There is only one scene in which Jews are massacred, and very little of the massacre is shown to the audience. On the contrary, it is the violence of the 'Basterds' that clues us in (again, indirectly, through obvious fiction) to the facts deep beyond the narrative.

The 'Basterds' are a group of Jewish American soldiers sent deep in to Nazi Occupied France to terrorize the occupiers. They are brutal. They kill without mercy. One of them bashes Nazi skulls with a baseball bat. Another carves swastikas in to their foreheads. They are all under orders to scalp their victims. We are shown a lot of this brutality (in Tarantino's unflinching and overblown style), and it is absolutely gruesome and bloody. But we know that there is something we haven't seen. The 'Basterds' are getting revenge, but we are forced to ask, 'revenge for what?' The full extent of Nazi brutality is the reason, of course, that they deserve their brutal fate. By asking the question, 'revenge for what?' we are led to think of the actual legacy of the Nazis, and again, the film draws our attention to the broad scope of real history while depicting events that we recognize as pure fiction.

Even in the film's final act, in which most of the Nazi high command is killed, we are provided with encouragement to be mindful of historical fact. At various moments, text appears on the screen to indicate different characters from the Nazi leadership. We recognize Hitler from popular culture, and Goebbels is introduced in the context of the narrative, but other prominent figures of the Nazi regime are identified to us, as if to say "you should recognize these people". It is, in a fictional context, an invitation to learn more about the facts, to learn the history.

Rather than giving us a picture of the Holocaust that we can walk away from and say "now I understand, now I know what it was all about", Tarantino gives us an experience that makes us feel, viscerally, just how angry we should be, and reminds us, by showing us what we know to be false, just how much we don't know of the truth of the Holocaust, of its true horrors.

In a very sophisticated way, 'Inglourious Basterds' achieves the goal of many Holocaust films -- it reminds us through ironic fiction that "we should never forget" the facts.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Defiance

2009-08-12T14:27:00.003-05:00

Before I begin discussing "Defiance", I would like to thank www.labeh-er.com for syndicating this article, and to welcome all of the new readers who have arrived here via that site. www.labeh-er.com is now publicizing my musings on Jewish or Israeli films, beginning with this one.

"Defiance" (2008, directed by Edward Zwick) is a mainstream, A-list Holocaust movie. It is the latest (or not even the latest any more) in a string of large-scale Hollywood films to tackle the subject of Germany's genocide. Any film that approaches this subject must do so carefully -- the Holocaust is a minefield of sensitivities, misinformation and anger. One of the central questions asked about Hollywood's various interpretations has to do with re-creation, and it is one aspect of this question that I would like to discuss here.

Aside from the obvious perverse aspect of "re-creating" the Holocaust, any re-enactment is necessarily less powerful, less monumental than the event itself. At the same time, a creative re-telling can often find a broader audience, and may bear meaning to more people than outright documentary. "Schindler's List" was, in many ways, a challenge to what had been considered the most monumental Holocaust film of its day: "Shoah" (1985). This documentary by Claude Lanzmann is nothing but interviews and contemporary, contemplative footage of the places where the recounted events unfolded. Jewish survivors, their non-Jewish counterparts, and other witnesses of the Holocaust tell their stories. The picture painted by "Shoah" is very broad, very personal, and very genuine. There is no archival footage in the film, no re-enactment, no attempt at creative short-hand to speed the story along. There is no doubt that this is one of the most compelling, important films on the Holocaust, but it has a fatal flaw: "Shoah" has a running time of roughly nine and a half hours! A few film buffs might have caught it at a film festival or two, but for the most part, the only people with the patience and commitment to sit through the entire film are people who are already very familiar with the Holocaust and its narratives. "Schindler's List", on the other hand, was seen by millions upon millions of people all over the world.
Re-enactment and dramatic re-creation can make the Holocaust accessible to the general public. Since "Schindler's List", large-scale films from Hollywood and elsewhere have been rising to the task. Of course, there are dangers behind using fiction to teach historical fact. First, especially with the Holocaust, narrative films always understate the situation. As vast and sweeping as films such as "Schindler's List", "Life is Beautiful" or "The Pianist" are, they still tell only a tiny fraction of the historical story. Each narrative includes characters and events that are meant to represent the broader catastrophe, but they can never fully capture its scope. Since many film viewers are not attuned to the representational tools employed by filmmakers, and since many films do not call attention to their own artifice, viewers often fuse what they see in films with what they've learned as facts. When those of us who did not experience the Holocaust think of the Holocaust, do we imagine things as they were, or do we imagine fictional images that we've seen on TV? The problem becomes more significant when it comes to the atrocities themselves. The Nazis were notorious propagandists, and as such, they maintained very careful control of the films and photographs taken in or around the central apparatus of their Final Solution. There is almost no footage at all from within a death camp or concentration camp during the war. So, when we think of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, what images come to mind? Are they images from historical footage, or are they re-creations? I would argue that the harshest images that come to mind are not authentic, but re-creations we've seen in films or on television.
Filmmakers who tackle the Holocaust must grapple with the challenge of presenting a compelling re-creation while reminding their viewers that what they are seeing is, in fact, not nearly as awful as the Holocaust itself. In effect, filmmakers must remind their audience that they are seeing a movie. This goes against the grain of the Hollywood aesthetic, which emphasizes hiding the movie-ness of a movie (you're not supposed to realize you're watching a movie when you're watching it -- you are meant to be completely absorbed in its narrative). Spielberg achieved this in "Schindler's List" in several ways, most notably with the well-known "girl in the red coat". Although the film is shot in black-and-white, the scene in which the Warsaw Ghetto is liquidated includes one splash of color - the red of a little, lost girl's coat stands out among the shades of gray. The scene is deeply moving, but also obviously artificial. As we watch the movie, we are reminded that we are watching a movie. Once we realize that, we can begin to understand the girl, the scene, and in fact the entire film as references to a broader historical tragedy.
"Defiance" approaches this challenge in a slightly different way. It begins with grainy, black-and-white footage of the Nazi invasion of Belarussia. We hear the gunshots, the screams, the sounds of chaos as the film unspools. I was very nervous when this scene began. The audio that underlies the archival images is not authentic to those images, but recorded nearly seventy years later by voice actors and sound effects artists half a world away from where the events took place. I know this, but would a typical viewer know it? Was the film trying to pass fiction off as fact (when the fact itself is strong enough without requiring falsification) After a short while, one shot, in particular, begins to change. It begins as a grainy black-and-white shot, apparently archival, but the scratches slowly fade away, and the image slowly gains its color. What appeared archival was, in fact, re-creation. We are shown this as a reminder of the artifice of what we are seeing, (a visual reminder, where the aural reminder might have been missed by most viewers) but also as a reminder of its connection to historical fact. In its first few minutes, "Defiance" defines itself in the context of the history it re-creates.
This somewhat self-reflexive moment is something to look for in any Holocaust film, especially in the context of education. Does the film offer reminders of its artifice, of the fact that what it presents is not the same as what it represents?
I am curious about how this will apply to Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds", which comes out this month. That film's premise is so over-the-top that it might not need to incorporate this sort of visual disclaimer. I'm sure to have a lot to say about it when I do catch it in theaters a few weeks from now, and I'm sure I'll write about it here. See you then!

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Public Enemies

2009-08-05T18:53:00.002-05:00

I would like to begin by noting that what I have seen of director Michael Mann's work, I have generally enjoyed. "Public Enemies" is no exception.

That said, what I'd like to focus on here is, arguably, a weak point of the film.

For the past several years, Michael Mann has been working at the forefront of the digital field, shooting features such as "Collateral" and "Miami Vice" in new, digital formats. In "Collateral", the digital medium served the film very well, lending it an additional and appropriate urban grit. "Public Enemies", which was also shot digitally, is a bit of a tougher call.

Before I go in to the pros and cons of the use of digital in this particular movie, I'd like to take a step back, to try to explain what this whole film vs. digital debate is all about.

First, a description of what it is you see when you see a projected film or a projected digital video.

Film is really just a thin layer of chemicals that at one point reacted to light, and that have since been 'locked' in such a way that they retain the very color to which they reacted. Each frame of a film is a photographic exposure, like a slide. When light is focused through that frame, the colors of the chemicals 'paint' the light, so that when it hits a white surface somewhere beyond the other side, an image appears. When twenty four of these images flash up on that white screen every second, they appear to blend with one another, and slight variations from one projected photograph to the next appear like movement.

Now, there are two critical elements to this discussion: Film grain and color depth.

I'll start with color depth, since it is fairly basic. Film has a very broad range of colors and shades that it is capable of replicating. As light changes, the chemical reactions in the film change to match it. Roughly, for any two shades of light, film can react to and recreate the shade in-between. Digital images, as their name implies, rely on digital interpretation of light. Different shades of light generate different numerical signals. Unlike film, video has no in-betweens. There may be millions of colors available to digital video, but since it relies on these absolute calculations, it misses the infinite varieties between those millions of colors (the color must be A or B or C, etc., so if the actual color is in-between, it gets forced one way or the other). As a result, digital images flatten out in low-light or low-contrast situations, where the slight differences in color and light are critical.

Film grain is a little harder to define, though I could probably point it out in a movie theater. When you're watching a film, look closely at the images. You may notice that there is a certain almost invisible 'speckling' on the screen. This is film grain, which is really the random arrangement of chemical molecules in a frame. Some film stocks are very 'grainy' (especially smaller film stocks -- 16mm or 8mm film, like old newsreels (often 16mm) or the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination (8mm)), whereas other film stocks tend to be much finer (most of what we see in theaters today is very fine-grain 35mm film). The most important thing to note about film grain is that it is randomly distributed. If there is a thicker grain in one particular corner of the screen in one frame, it probably won't be there in the next. At 24 frames per second, especially if the grain is very fine, you're not very likely to see it at all. As a result, the colors on the screen blend together more smoothly, and take on a much more dimensional appearance.

Now, digital video functions in a very different way. We've discussed how it records light and color in increments, with none of the nuanced in-between steps that film can pick up. Another difference is the way that digital images are organized. Whereas film has randomly-distributed 'grain', digital images are projected in a neat grid. Row after row of pixels form the organizational structure of a digital image. With each successive frame, all of the pixels change color and intensity, creating the next photographic image. Here's the key, though: the pixels do not change location! This means that unlike film, where the grain's placement is random and constantly shifting, pixels stay stationary, and therefore, they are visible! Look closely at your computer monitor right now (which, chances are, is currently set to a resolution equal or greater than 'high definition' television). See the grid? Even if you were playing a movie, get right up close and you'd see the grid. The same goes for movie theaters. Get close to the screen when it's a digital image, and you'll see the individual boxes of color that make up the image, neatly arranged. Presumably, if there are enough pixels, they become too small for us to really notice. This is why high definition images have more pixels than standard definition images, and why the digital projections in movie theaters have even more pixels than the high def stuff we see at home. But no matter how small the pixels are, the grid itself is still there, and it's still a part of the image that we're seeing. It's like looking out a window through a screen. You rarely think about it, but if you were to move the screen out of the way, the image that you would see would be very different.

Will these issues always be present? I doubt it. There's a lot of innovation happening in the world of moving images. But does this mean that digital images are not as "good" as film images? Well, sort of. Depends on what you need. It's hard to justify shooting film for a TV show (although they do it for certain large-scale productions such as "Lost"). Video is faster, cheaper, more easily tweaked, and in the end, no one is going to watch their favorite sitcom on a big screen with a projector whirring behind them. We watch TV on TV, so why not shoot digitally?

For some movies, the digital option makes a lot of sense. Sometimes, it's an economic consideration. On the independent side of things, it's much cheaper to shoot video than to shoot film, so if you're going to make a movie without lots of money, video is the way to go. On a larger scale, the difference in cost is less substantial. Hollywood-level technologies are extremely expensive, and the personnel required to manage the data aren't cheap to hire, either. That said, digital works for some films (such as Michael Mann's "Collateral", mentioned above), where their content or subject matter or setting interact well with the 'look' of digital.

That brings me, at long last, to "Public Enemies". I saw it knowing it was shot digitally, and I found that I could strongly sense the difference. Some scenes looked 'cheap', with the colors or textures of a daytime soap opera, or of a 1990s action TV show, and others looked a little like they were shot on a camcorder, the darker areas collapsing in to 'noise' (the mess of dark purple floating spots that appear when the camera doesn't know how to differentiate between one kind of darkness and another -- the pesky 'in-betweens'). When I got home, I read this interesting article in Millimeter in which Michael Mann discusses the choice of shooting digitally, and the process of testing the digital process, and comparing it to traditional film. The kind of careful thought and consideration that went in to the choice to shoot digitally has made me wonder if perhaps I might have been thrown off by my own expectations. Mann chose to shoot the film in a way that would specifically undercut the romanticism of 1933 (whereas I expected it would be a highly romanticized story). He wanted it frank, straightforward, almost candid, so he chose a format that is still predominantly used for documentaries and the news.

Unfortunately, I think the way the film was shot may have undermined a little of what Mann was trying to do. There are some outstanding camera moves, fascinating bits of slow motion, very dramatic angles... all of which serve to romanticize the narrative. Also, the depression era was a time that seems to have romanticized itself. I'm not sure that it's possible to look at the high-stakes players of the era without romanticization creeping in. These inconsistencies between the choice of format and the other decisions surrounding the look of the film make the whole effect rather shaky. I wonder what might have happened if Mann had kept all of the beautiful production design (the cars, clothes, buildings, all the little details), but shot the movie with the kind of camera that local news stations use -- and if he had shot it as if he were just a guy in the room with a camera. It would have been totally different, but I think the unglamorized effect he was looking for might have come through more effectively.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Philadelphia Story

2009-08-03T13:32:00.002-05:00

For all that can be said about this wonderful, classic comedy, the thing that struck me the most was its pacing.

It is said of good comedy that it relies on a mysterious thing called "comic timing" in order to work most effectively. This comic timing seems to have a lot to do with the careful buildup, maintenance of and eventual reversal of expectations. Somehow, we enjoy the resulting surprise, and in the best cases, we appreciate the process by means of which we are led along to that surprise.

And so, before I saw "The Philadelphia Story", I expected a speedy sort of rhythm, a comedic cadence, something that I could identify as "comic timing". I think that much of my expectation rested on the film's editing. In most recent comedies, comedic timing is manufactured in post production. The amount of time we spend between a joke and its punch-line is dictated by an editor's choice of when to cut from one shot to the next. As a result, comedies have developed a certain quickness, especially around those scenes and moments where the greatest humor is intended. "The Philadelphia Story", by contrast, was surprisingly patient in its cutting. Some wildly witty conversations even seemed to transpire without so much as a single cut. The humor inherent in the film, then, is not so reliant on the editor's wit, but on the comic senses of its actors. The editor can't fix bad comic timing when the entire scene is contained in one shot.

This kind of comedy is rarely seen in contemporary movies. Filmmakers, understandably, hedge their bets by covering scenes from multiple angles, and by shooting with the expectation that comic timing come together in the editing room. Actors, too, seem to be deferring to the editor. There's less risk of a joke falling flat if it can be tweaked to perfection before the film hits the screen.

But there are many bad comedies! With all of this control over comic timing and delivery, it's astounding how hard it is to make a comedy work! I think that a part of the issue has to do with the palpable sense of risk. The best jokes are the ones that are riskiest to tell, because they can fall flat so easily. We've all had the experience of trying and failing to re-tell a joke that cracked us up when we first heard it. With constant editing and tweaking of comic timing, the danger of a flat joke is minimized, and as such, the humor that results is quite a bit less surprising. We know it'll be something funny, which already makes it less funny than it could have been. When the risk is still present, still palpable, there's always the chance that the most un-funny, profoundly level-headed thing will be said next, and when that's the case, the unexpectedness of the punch-line adds to its powerful effect.

The longer takes and sparser cutting of "The Philadelphia Story" inject the comedy with that very sense of danger, of unexpectedness that many comedies miss. Not every joke is funny, but since we're not primed for the funny jokes, and since we learn to expect some of the humor to fail a little, the successful jokes hit us all the harder.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Unforgiven

2009-07-14T08:19:00.002-05:00

It is interesting to look at "Unforgiven" and to see two sides of Clint Eastwood in deep, internal conflict.

The film hit theaters in 1992, roughly in the middle of his remarkable second career as a director, but before his most critically acclaimed work ("Mystic River", "Million Dollar Baby", "Flags of Our Fathers" and its companion film, "Letters from Iwo Jima")

The film also comes at the end of Eastwood's legendary acting career (though he has played in films since then, none of his performances have the legendary stature of his turns in "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" or "Dirty Harry")

As I watched his performance and his direction take hold of one another, it occurred to me that "Unforgiven" gives a fascinating glimpse in to the mind of the actor and of the filmmaker. Particularly, the point of intersection between Eastwood's two roles sheds light on the secrets behind his acting success, and behind his filmmaking prowess.

Although his famous stoic performances seem to be the epitome of flatness, a careful look reveals a very calculated, often masked sense of depth -- there is always more underneath an Eastwood character than the actor overtly displays. This is true of his performance in "Unforgiven", just as much as it's true in his earlier acting work. It is fascinating to note how much this has affected his directorial style, as well -- Eastwood's films tend to focus heavily on their characters. Despite the fights, the shoot-outs, and the action, his films tend to be very mellow, very conversational, drawing us in to a small circle of personalities and quirks that are to become our companions for two hours. As a filmmaker, Eastwood does not rely on his camera (like Spielberg or Hitchcock) or on the structure of his narrative, or on eye-popping content, but rather, on complex characters with numerous hidden layers.

In "Unforgiven", this strategy is at play in both the direction of the film and in the performance of its leading actor. Taking a broader view of Eastwood's work, the strategy appears consistently in all of his major productions, from his stoic but layered performance in the Spaghetti Westerns, to his unraveling of Angelina Jolie's character in "Changeling" (2008)

It's inspiring to me that an artist who sticks his neck out as both an actor and as a director has such a strong vision for what matters in a story that both his performances and his direction clearly reflect that vision. It demonstrates an artistic integrity that is hard to find in most major productions.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Third Man

2009-07-09T15:39:00.003-05:00

I have to say, I found this one to be a very strange and interesting piece of work.
With all the deep shadows, dutch angles, whole segments in German, the film maintains a steady, constant sense of imbalance. It's a sort of suspense that I haven't seen in a while, and that strikes me as almost unique to the Film Noir era, of which this film is a part. Most movies today rely much more on what they can show, not on what they can hide.

To me, the most striking element of "The Third Man" was the balance it struck between selfish motivations (which are prominent in film noir) and selfless motivations (more common to WWII-era films, such as "Casablanca"). The film's hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), vacillates constantly between higher and lower ambitions, between being a civic hero and a friend, between being a lover and a fighter. Interestingly, the film's intiial 'bad guy' shifts in his archtypal role as well, never comfortably fitting as an ally or enemy. Perhaps this is one of the film's triumphs (aside from the amazing way the camera is employed to twist one's mind). It is a remarkably mature look at the complexities of alleigance, loyalty, friendship and love. Perhaps even more striking is the film's historical context, with the nation on the verge of McCarthyism, and questions of loyalty at the forefront of the public consciousness.

On a side note, I imagine stories from the set must be quite wild. This is one of David O. Selznick's last films as a producer (he is not even credited, although the film was made by his company), and it stars Orson Welles at a time when Hollywood had yet to fully recognize his genius. Both men were known to be larger-than-life, with egos to match their talent, with fiery tempers, and with very clear and firm artistic visions. I wonder if they got along, and I wonder how milder personalities like Cotten and the film's director, Carol Reed, counterbalanced the dynamic personalities.

-AzS

musing pictures: UP

2009-07-03T16:19:00.002-05:00

A brief musing on this latest Pixar/Disney collaboration.

The American Dream used to be for the young. The message was clear: here, in this land of opportunity, there is hope for any young, ambitious, hard-working individual to achieve the greatest of dreams. If you build it, they will come. That train engine from that popular children's story thinks he can, and indeed he does. With your life ahead of you, you are encouraged to charge forward, follow your dreams, wish upon that star!

But what does this American Dream become when you've spent forty five years hard at work, when what used to be a lifetime is now the duration of your upcoming "golden years"? The new Disney/Pixar feature, "UP", revises the American Dream for the retiring Boomer generation, and it does it so cleanly and effectively, you could miss the switch if you blink.

Disney films are often about transitions; from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from the pre-romantic to the romantic stages of life. Snow White, Aurora and Cinderella find their princes-Charming, Pinnochio and Dumbo learn to fill their own shoes (a real boy, a flying elephant), Belle learns to see past the frightful mask of the Beast. The young characters have dreams, and they learn to achieve them. By the time the characters begin their adult lives, they have reached their cruising altitude. "Happily Ever After" is a shorthand for the stable, static years of middle-life, years which are devoid of turmoil and free from challenge.

"UP" is very much a story in this vein. The main character has his own dream, he achieves it in a way, and lives happily ever after. Here's the difference: This man's dream is not achieved in the dawn of his adult life, but at the height of his sunset. It's a dream from childhood, and a dream that he and his wife pursue for their entire long life together, but by the time she passes away, the dream is still unfulfilled. Now an old man, our crotchety hero has lived through the promised "happily ever after" years without the dream coming any closer. Perhaps this is the boomer's worst fear: to work and work for years and years, only to retire no closer to the goal, or too frail or too tired to enjoy it. The new vision for the American Dream outlined so elegantly in "UP" provides the same uplifting hope, the same motivational message as the old version: the dream can still live on, the elderly can still do great things, there is meaning in being old, there is life to be lived in the final act of our days.

Although "UP" is the first mainstream film to lay this message out so clearly (and so much in parallel with the old American Dream of earlier Disney films), other recent Hollywood pictures have addressed the same themes. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" did so by presenting an old man growing young, showing by metaphor a lively, adventurous option for a retiree's life. Benjamin Button is physically young, but has the life experience of decades. He sees the world as an elderly man, but fulfills the dream of many aging people by being young, by getting younger. Much like the old man in "UP", Button has his most youthful adventures at the end of his life, when most people tend to slow down.

As the Baby Boomer generation grows older, it is interesting to watch Hollywood's message shift. I'm certain that for the next decade or two, there will be a massive shift in the kinds of stories Hollywood tells, and in the kinds of heroes Hollywood invents. they will be older, wiser, and probably just retiring when these new stories begin. I'm very curious to see how this unfolds.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Dirty Dozen (1967)

2009-06-14T14:53:00.002-05:00

Just a short musing on "The Dirty Dozen", a Robert Aldrich war film from 1967. In the film, twelve life-sentence or death-row WWII soldiers are pulled out of military prison to train for a mass-assassination mission, in which they are to kill numerous Nazi commanders vacationing in a lavish countryside chateau. Of course, the film's final act is the mission itself, and here are some interesting details (so if you haven't seen the film yet, but are planning to, save this musing for later). Things (of course) go awry, and most of the Nazi commanders seem to escape to their underground bomb shelter. The team, of course, has other plans for them. Above ground, their commander, Major Reisman (Lee Marvin), instructs the soldiers to find the bomb shelter's air shafts, and to drop gasoline and grenades down at the trapped Nazis below. They do this, and for a short while, the Nazis suffer the agony of knowing that they're trapped, and that death is being dropped down on them through holes in their ceiling. Then they are blown up.

The imagery is striking. Hollywood's first overt post-war depiction of concentration camps did not hit the screens until Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker, in 1964, three short years before "The Dirty Dozen", and even then, the images were fairly brief, just flashes of memory. Dogs, fences, cattle cars... It would be a very long time before a Hollywood film would venture in to the gas chambers themselves (this is something even Spielberg avoided in "Schindler's List" (1993)). But here, we have a clear visual parallel -- people jammed together in a concrete tomb with death being poured down on them (the same way that Zyklon-B canisters were dropped in to the gas chambers through vents in the ceilings). I do not know who in the production of "The Dirty Dozen" might have had the experience to know these details, but the scenes do seem like a dark fantasy of revenge. I don't think it's completely coincidental, either, that the perpetrators of this reversal are themselves criminals in this story. As nice as it can be sometimes to fantasize about exterminating the Nazis, even the imagination will not allow the 'good old boys' to do the deed.

When Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" hits theaters in a short while, I imagine that similar themes will present themselves (and I wouldn't be surprised if "The Dirty Dozen" is heavily cited as a thematic and narrative predecessor to "Basterds" in reviews and critiques of the newer film)

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Star Trek

2009-06-01T19:26:00.002-05:00

The analysis of a new Hollywood film tends to fall in to one of two categories: the review or the critique. Although J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" is ripe with material for either style, I would like to shy away from critique, and as is my habit in these pages, I will avoid the typical trappings of a review. To me, the most fascinating achievement of "Star Trek" is not the film itself (which is, I must note, exceptionally fun), but rather in the fascinating way it simultaneously links to and breaks away from its predecessors.

I am compelled here to give fair warning that this article will not shy away from the twists or surprises of the film's plot. If you feel that such revelations may spoil your initial experience of the film, I recommend that you go see it, then return here for some thoughts to ponder.

From the outset, anyone tackling a new "Star Trek" narrative faces a dilemma: How do you tell a new story when so much of the popularity of the franchise rests on the old characters? The "Star Trek" narrative, which began with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the crew of the USS Enterprise in the mid-'60s, has remained true to its original universe through all of its iterations. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" brought viewers back to the same space, with the same planets, life forms, and even a version of the same ship, crewed by a new set of characters. The show injected innovation to the old concept by providing new characters, and new settings - new planets and systems in farther reaches of space. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine provided not only the same universe, but began while The Next Generation was still an active show, and takes place in the same era, with characters and narratives overlapping. Its innovations were primarily structural - yes, there was yet another new set of characters, but this time, the show adopted a more serialized format, and took on themes such as religious faith which had been forbidden initially by Gene Roddenberry, the visionary behind Star Trek (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek) Star Trek Voyager, the next show to hit the small screen, returns to the old format, with a ship (a contemporary of the USS Enterprise and of DS9), a crew (of new characters, again), and the same universe... sort of. The Voyager narrative has the title ship flung accidentally to a part of space so far from Earth that it would take them seventy five years to return. This allows for the possibility of completely re-drawing the face of space, in that everything that USS Voyager encounters can be encountered by the crew and by the audience for the very first time. Star Trek Enterprise, the last of the TV shows, attempts something of an origin story, introducing the first captain and first crew of the brand new Enterprise, decades before the original series' narrative would begin. Again, same ship, same universe, but it takes a step back in time, rather than forward. The technologies that had become familiar have yet to be invented, many species that had been encountered over the decades have yet to become known to the first Enterprise crew. In all, the Star Trek shows all conform to one massive narrative line -- they all take place in the same universe, such that an event in "Enterprise" is effectively a part of the history in "The Next Generation", and an event in "The Next Generation" may be recent news in "Deep Space Nine", or the subject of a distant signal in "Voyager".

The Star Trek films, too, fall in to this arc of fictional history. The first of these, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", picks up a while after the original series left off, and subsequent films proceed chronologically, with Captain Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise (which gets destroyed and rebuilt as the Enterprise A, and again as the Enterprise B). An episode of "The Next Generation" flashes back to the Enterprise C, but the show revolves around the Enterprise D. With the seventh film, "Generations", the Enterprise E is introduced, and remains the central ship in all subsequent films until this most recent addition.

And so, after decades of creative continuity, and centuries of narrative continuity, the business apparatus behind "Star Trek" faces a quandary. Since "The Next Generation", new Star Trek programs have been decreasing in popularity. The characters most well-known and most well-loved are played by aging and dying actors, which means that their characters are also aging, dying or already dead. New iterations of the franchise did not embed new legends in the public consciousness the way the original series defined Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the rest of the crew, or the way The Next Generation brought Captain Picard, Data, Worf, and their compatriots to life. They tried new ships, but nothing is as legendary as the Enterprise. They tried new captains, but none have outshone Kirk or Picard. They have introduced new creatures, new technologies, but none have stood out like the transporter, phaser or hypo sprays of the first shows and films. The realization must have been settling in over the past decade or so that the best things Star Trek had to offer were already there, already created, already celebrated by fans and followers.

And that is where this new film enters the fray. "Star Trek", rather than being an attempt at creating something new in the world fans know so well, attempts to re-create that very world, to tell the story all over again, with the full knowledge of how it has played out before.

Yet again, "Star Trek" is the story of Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Checkov, Sulu, McCoy, and the rest of them. But here's where it gets fascinating. "Star Trek" is not a re-make. It is not like all of those numerous films from the past ten years or so that have attempted to update classic TV shows with new stars playing old characters, in worlds that are meant to be re-creations of the worlds we remember, but which are not contiguous with those worlds. When the mid-'60s TV show "Bewitched" was released as a film in 2005, with Nicole Kidman in Elizabeth Montgomery's starring role, the world of the film was not meant to be identical to the world of the TV show. There is not a sense that if Kidman's character were to go back in time, she could meet Montgomery's character at the market. They are two films telling the same story, not about the same characters, but about parallel characters. And there, perhaps, is the word that defines the process -- the re-make is a film that parallels its predecessor.

"Star Trek" could have easily taken this route. With a new cast playing old characters, the original series could have been re-created. New films could have been set in Kirk's time, with a Captain Kirk leading the Enterprise on its well-known mission. The new would overlap and replace the old, asserting itself in the greater Star Trek timeline, or simply ignoring that timeline and setting out anew. The Kirk we knew would no longer be relevant. The re-made Kirk would be captain now.

Although re-makes of that sort can occasinally be very compelling, interesting and effective, the process often strikes people as being somehow cheap, uncreative -- 'recycling' other peoples' good ideas, and often missing the point as a result.

It is fascinating to me that "Star Trek" manages to achieve all of the benefits of a re-make (new life to old standards, etc.), while maintaining the narrative integrity of everything that came before it.

What makes the film work in this critical, transitional way, is an element that the original show was often mocked for: time travel.

A character named Nero (Eric Bana) from a time somewhere near the end of the greater Star Trek timeline, goes back in time, by chance, to the day James Kirk is born. At that point, Nero changes everything. His appearance prompts Kirk's father, himself a starship officer, to investigate this new disturbance in space. The resulting encounter destroys the elder Kirk's ship, kills the father, and in an instant, changes the course of history. The James Kirk of the '60s knew his father. That had been a part of the Star Trek timeline for decades. How might things change, then, with this one event shifting history? Twenty five years later, Nero is emboldened to strike again. His nemesis, our very own familiar friend, Spock, has come back in time, as well. Nero, who thinks that Spock destroyed his world, sets out to destroy Vulcan, and wants Spock to watch. Even more dramatic than Kirk's twist of fate is that of the Vulcan planet itself. Nero does, in fact, destroy it, and we are left to wonder how it is that the planet exists in what had been the Star Trek narrative from this point forward.

Time travel stories often result in paradoxes. A character goes back in time, changes things, and the reason for his going back in time in the first place is made to never happen. So, why is he back in time? What prompted the journey? If there was no prompt, then there would have been no trip, and if there were no trip, the prevented event would have gone on as usual, which would have prompted a trip back in time... and so forth. Often, science fiction ignores the paradox, prefering that those who go back in time simply make the wrong thing right, then return to their own time, to a place where all is back to normal as a result of their tinkering.

Since that is the typical time-travel story (character goes back, fixes, returns to future), we rarely see it from the other side, from the perspective of the here-and-now that gets visited from the future.

Those stories come up rarely because the power of a time travel narrative is that we know the future. I can't emphasize that enough: For a story about going back in time to be effective, we must know the future! Otherwise, the dangers of changing the past are irrelevant. When we go back in time in "Back to the Future", we know the world Marty McFly comes from. Without that, we wouldn't know what 'normal' he's fighting for, and we wouldn't know the difference when he returns to a very different version of his own time. If "Back to the Future" were presented exclusively in 1955, it would be a love story, but we wouldn't care at all about the future. We would have no access to it.

"Star Trek" is a story about not just any future, but about a future that we have already seen. By connecting it directly to the greater Star Trek timeline, it is identified as a part of that greater narrative, not as a re-hashing of it. An elderly Spock arrives from the future. He is the same Spock, the identical character as the one we know from the original TV series, from the previous films, and from various appearances on the other shows. This is a part of that great timeline. When Kirk's father dies, those very well-versed in the Star Trek narrative recognize it as a break, a discontinuity. When Nero destroys Vulcan, even occasional fans of the show know this to be somehow wrong, somehow not-the-way-it-should-have-been. To Nero, this is a story about re-setting the future, but he has no plans to return to that future. He is avenging the destruction of his world, but knows that nothing he can do will bring it back. He knows that his world exists in this past, but knows it is not his own. Spock, too, knows that he can not return to his own time, that the future that he left is no longer the future that lies before him. The future that we once knew so well is suddenly and dramatically redrawn. Things have changed so much, and as such, the new future of Star Trek is a blank slate, on which anything can be drawn. A new story can be told about Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, but it does not negate the stories that have already been told. To the older Spock, those stories from the original series did happen. He did experience them. They are just as real as these new, parallel narratives are, and he is the bridge that fascinatingly connects them.

In this way, Star Trek resets the clock without wiping teh slate completely clean. We begin again with Kirk, Spock, and the original crew, and their future is fresh, not the same as the history we already know. They have branched off in to an alternative timeline, but the universe is still the same. The Borg that Picard and company encounter in The Next Generation are still out there. The various planets and life forms still exist (minus Vulcan, of course). The familiar crew is about to set out on its first mission to explore strange new worlds that we have already seen, to seek out new life and new civilizations that we have already explored, to boldly go for the first time where their parallel selves have gone, not before, but in a future that is not their own.

Hollywood, as we all know, necessarily merges art and business. Most sequels, prequels, remakes and spinoffs emerge from the business end of the industry. They are designed to make money, to give fans another reason to go to the movies, and to keep an income-generating franchise current. From a business perspective, the ideal scenario is for the film to draw back the original fan base, and to attract new fans to the story, characters, or world. I can not think of any film, of any franchise, that has achieved this so artfully, elegantly, and with so much astounding narrative complexity as "Star Trek" has. Spock would raise an eyebrow and pronounce it "fascinating".

-AzS

Musing Pictures: State of Play

2009-04-19T19:12:00.003-05:00

I did not expect to see this movie. With so little time to go to the movies anyway, I imagined I'd hit the major blockbusters, if I could. But this past Friday, with relatively few spectaculars hitting the screens, I found myself catching an opening matinee of "State of Play", the new political thriller from director Kevin Macdonald, whose "The Last King of Scotland" was quite engrossing.

If you catch this film, keep an eye out for the way that Macdonald uses the incidental, mundane moments of a busy, urban life to generate tension. I found myself marveling, by scene two, at the deft way that a morning commute could build to a tense, dramatic (and amazingly, un-revealed) climax. All we see are normal, every-day occurences, transactions and scenes. People walking, paying, driving, crowding... but that, combined with the score, the sound effects and the frantic (but not distracting) pace, becomes both engrossing and suspenseful.

Like many of the great political thrillers of the '70s, "State of Play" is presented at an observational distance. Macdonald presents us with the situation, the players, and their problems, and allows us to follow their worries, and in a way, to worry with them, but not through them. We care about the characters (or, at least, some of them), but we are not in thier shoes. In this way, we are provided with an opportunity to participate in the mystery without being quite as lost as the characters within it are.

The observational element takes on a sinister tone at some parts of the film where we are given a rare sequence of perspective. Typically, a point-of-view shot is book-ended by images of the character whose point of view we are seeing. We are primed, often by a close-up or a medium-shot of a character looking off-screen. We are provided with the image of what that character sees, the point-of-view shot. We are then returned to that character, to see that character's reaction, and base our own off of it. Several times in "State of Play", Macdonald provides us with a subjective perspective, indicated not by the book-end shots, but by a slightly bobbing camera, focused on a subject (a character in potential jeopardy, usually), with some element of the setting (like the hood of a car, or the corner of a building) partially visible in the foreground. We are provided with the sense that one of the characters is being watched, but without being presented with the watcher, we incorporate the role on ourselves.

"State and Play" pits characters against one another -- everyone is wrong about something at some point in the narrative. Just like the characters secretly scrutinize one another, so do we scrutinize them. It makes us uncomfortable, and we feel concern for the characters we see (thinking, for a moment, that someone else, not us, is watching them) but we are in this way drawn in to their world, and become at least partially complicit in the kinds of behaviors that lead the film along its narrative course.

The net effect is a good one. "State of Play" is a terse, effective, engaging thriller. I'm quite curious to see what Macdonald will work on next...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Watchmen

2009-03-24T12:04:00.002-05:00

It is quite rare that I find myself reacting to a film with exactly the opposite sentiments of Roger Ebert (whose tastes generally parallel my own). Ebert's review focuses on the story behind "Watchmen" (that is to say, on the innovations of the plot, of the characters, and of the way they break certain 'comic book' molds). Unfortunately, those innovations almost certainly did not originate with the film, but rather with its source material, a very popular and groundbreaking graphic novel.

After giving credit where it is due, the film itself lacks almost everything that would make for the outstanding classic that it could have been. It lacks what a good film truly needs (clear narrative, compelling characters, propulsive rhythm, etc.) and showcases a lot of what a good film really doesn't require (high-concept visuals and fancy effects). In many ways, this is much like Zack Snyder's earlier nightmare, "300", which also featured a paper-thin narrative, exceptionally flat characters, and all the evidence of a clear value judgment that opted for flashy visuals over pithy substance. Both films, despite being 'action' films, got rather boring, as there never developed any reason to engage with or worry about the central characters.

Ebert is right about one thing: the innovations and serious issues presented by the "Watchmen" narrative are extraordinary. This makes the film's choice of style over substance all the more befuddling. Why aim for style when the substance is what makes the source material so effective?

This is one of those films which really shouldn't have been released. The intrinsic problems with it are so elementary, so clearly on the surface that they should have been spotted and fixed by the many people who managed the production before it hit the screens.

The Hollywood system has produced many outstanding films over the years. Why was the ball dropped with this one?

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Tremors

2009-02-22T19:39:00.002-05:00

I haven't even finished watching "Tremors" (1990, Ron Underwood) and I'm already quite struck by one remarkable thing: unlike most horror films, this one takes place almost entirely during the day. The effect is interesting, but campy. It had been done fifteen years earlier, of course, with "Jaws" (which includes more scenes in darkness, but which operates on the same principle of a visible surface concealing an invisible menace... Jaws does it better, of course...)

It all reminds me of another film that plays with the opposite construct -- "Pitch Black" (2000, David Twohy) sets the danger not in a typical darkness, but in a total void of light that is true to the title. All three films evince a very strong awareness of an important horror concept, not just that the unseen is more frightening than the visible, but the curtain we see in front of us is more frightening than the edge of the frame.

I ran in to this realization on a short film I recently directed. In the short, a character is brutally attacked by a large monster. When the scene was shot, it was staged in such a way that the monster consistently entered from off-camera. Sometimes a hand entered frame, sometimes a torso... and as it turned out, the effect seemed hokey. But when the monster emerged from the shadows, there was something much more menacing about it, something much more believable. (a lot of this realization is thanks to observations by my friend JB, who noted the effect in an early cut of the film).

In "Jaws", we see the water, and infer the shark beyond it. In "Tremors", we see the sandy ground. "Pitch Black" relies on our recognition of a very vivid, almost tangible darkness. These are the surfaces from which the terrors come. In many horror films, though, terrors emerge from around corners, or even from the edge of the frame -- from places that are not our focus, that we can not look at (the edge of a frame, after all, is nothing more than the difference between color, texture and light -- it is not a thing in itself, but a change of pattern that we are seeing). To see something tangible (a surface, physical or implied) makes the implied horror behind it seem more real as well.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Quantum of Solace

2008-11-18T18:44:00.002-05:00

A review of this film by Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun calls attention to the frantic pace of the editing in this latest James Bond installment. I'd like to expand on Sragow's complaint, and perhaps illustrate what the editing achieves (and what it doesn't).

In an opening chase scene that borrows as much from "Ben Hur" as from every other Bond flick, James (again, Daniel Craig, who does a good job of it) is being chased by suave hoodlums in nice, black cars. Although it's very easy to understand what's going on, we aren't really presented with sequential details. We get everything in very brief flashes. Some spike jams in to Bond's car. There's a truck up ahead! There's a roadblock! they're shooting! But the sequence doesn't really come across as a sequence. The usual vocabulary of the road chase gets truncated and interrupted by very quick, hard-to-follow shots. While watching the scene, I found myself wishing that certain shots had held for a bit longer, just so I could get my bearings, get a sense of who's where, what's the danger, where's the way out, etc.

There is a lot of good reason to pace chase sequences quickly, of course. Tight, speedy editing can really punch-up a good scene, can give it a dynamic edge. But a good scene, after all, has to follow an intelligible sequence of events, and the footage has to illustrate that sequence, and guide us through it, so that at every point we know everything we need to know to follow the action (without knowing too much, of course). Although there may have been an intelligible sequence of events in this film's first chase scene, the editorial choices undercut the flow of that sequentiality, and end up conveying "chase" without really outlining it or walking us through it.

For an excellent chase scene, take a look at another Bond film, "Goldeneye," When that James Bond steals a tank to get away from his captors. That scene, which begins with a wonderful shot of the tank barelling through a large brick wall, is very classically structured. If there is a twist, we are presented with it moments before it enters the narrative. If there is an obstacle, we are shown it with enough time to understand and sense Bond's jeopardy. Relative to the new film's first chase scene, the "Goldeneye" scene takes its time, and in a way, comes across as more suspenseful.

There is a keyword here: Jeopardy. If there is not enough time for, or not enough information for us to register a character's jeopardy, the scene won't be as suspenseful. As a result of the editing, "Quantum of Solace" falls in to this trap numerous times. It's not that Bond isn't in danger -- on the contrary, Daniel Craig's Bond is one of the most vulnerable in the francheis. But we just aren't given enough time to see and to process the danger before Bond is forced to react to it.

On the whole, I am a little surprised at this particular quirk of the film (which is otherwise a fine and often interesting film). The director, Marc Forster, has quite a few subtler, quieter, slower films under his belt (such as "The Kite Runner" and "Stranger than Fiction"). Even the editors should have known better. Matt Chesse (who also worked with Forster on several quieter films) and Richard Pearson (who edited for the outstanding Paul Greengrass on very well-paced films such as "United 93" and "The Bourne Supremacy") seem like the sort of editing duo any production would envy. Did their opposite experiences (one of quiet contemplation, one of intense action and drama) cancel each other out in some way? I'm not sure. Pearson, in particular, surprises me here.

They call this "MTV-style" editing, but I feel that it has gone farther than that. Music videos do not need to convey narrative in the way that movies do. Certainly, film editing has gotten quite choppy over the past few decades, but I wonder what has brought it to this point.

In order for film editing to really remain an effective and critical part of the cinematic process, editors have to bring their attention back to the storytelling, and to the idea that a sequence is not just a series of visceral moments, but a careful construction of elements to create and guide an audience's clear and lucid understanding of a chain of events.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Incredible Hulk (2008)

2008-06-25T18:39:00.003-05:00

Comics, the Internet, and the New Lateral Narrative

I came out of the movie theater after seeing "The Incredible Hulk" with one dominant thought: the very idea of a narrative thread is changing in Hollywood.

The film, based on a Marvel Comics narrative, tells the story of Bruce Banner, a scientist with a mysterious self-induced problem -- he turns in to a gigantic, enraged green monster if his heart rate goes up too high. The story is told in the usual fashion, in three structured segments, with an opening that introduces the characters, their dilemmas, a long central unit comprised primarily of cat-and-mouse (or carrot-and-stick) scenes, and an action-packed resolution in which characters mature, face their inner demons, and find the willpower to smash the true enemy, which reveals itself at long last.

This is all very standard, very entertaining stuff. Hollywood has been at this task for a century, building story-after-story on this structure.

But "The Incredible Hulk" doesn't begin with Hollywood. It begins elsewhere, in a very different industry, with a very different medium.

Marvel Comics introduced The Hulk to its readership in the 1960s, along with numerous other characters that have become icons of the industry. Each character had a story, an emergence in to the "Marvel Universe". In 1963, The Hulk joined other characters (Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Wasp) in a superhero team known as "The Avengers". This may seem trivial at first, but it exemplifies something revolutionary -- "The Avengers" is a convergence of several entirely different narratives. Characters which had been conceived independently of one another, and which were written in to worlds of their own, were brought to share the same page with one another. Instead of the "Avengers" story having a linear structure, with one beginning leading through a series of connected plot points to one end, the story has numerous beginnings -- the beginnings of each character's story -- which parallel one another, and which only rarely intersect. The "Avengers" narrative is actually multiple narratives woven together.

This is not like the simpler convergence one might see in such films as that 1987 novelty piece, "The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones". In that example, characters from one narrative leave their world (via a time machine) and enter in to the world of the other narrative. There is no implied continuity between one and the other, except for the rough, self-contradictory link between distant time periods. It is also not like those Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in which characters from the Enterprise interact with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty. There, science fiction allows Captain Picard, Data and the others to create imagined versions of those characters -- they meet recreations, not the characters themselves. Holmes in Star Trek is a reflection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character, but he is not a continued version of Holmes himself.

If anything, it is more akin to the way that three Star Trek shows are presented as contemporaries of one another -- The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all take place at around the same timeframe, within the same narrative universe. Of course, this is television -- the rules are different.

For some reason, the sort of intermingling of narratives seen in the world of comics has not made much of an appearance in films. Even in films based on comic books, an individual character still drives the franchise. There is a reason for this.

In the past, if a Hollywood studio wanted to make a Superman film, they'd buy the rights to Superman from DC comics, and they'd make films with and about Superman. If they wanted to make a Batman film, they'd buy those rights, and make a film with and about Batman. Often, the films would be produced by different companies, with entirely different production teams creating entirely different worlds. The world of Richard Donner's "Superman" in 1978 could not be more different than Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman", even though both are Warner Brothers pictures.

"The Incredible Hulk" marks the beginning of a very different approach to these kinds of stories. An astute observer might note, early in the film, that the company that sponsors Dr. Banner's research is Stark Industries. The name of the company, and its logo, appear briefly in the film. Amazingly, the logo is identical in design and format to the logo of Stark Industries as it appears in last month's "Iron Man" (another excellent comic-based film).

The convergence of one small production design element might not seem like much, but it is significant. In a different context, this would never have happened. The typical Hollywood production stands on its own. Whoever works on "Iron Man" works on "Iron Man", and whoever works on "Hulk" works on "Hulk", and even if the same production designer goes from one film to the other, the artwork for each is expected to be unique. Each film is designed by its own team, is made to have its own individual 'look' and 'feel'. Each production team is hoping to create its own franchise, its own recognizable brand image.

"The Incredible Hulk" and "Iron Man" were marketed this way -- they were presented to us as two entirely un-related films, with entirely un-related stories. Except for comic book afficionados, who among us would have noted that both films are being released by the same production company, or that they share key personnel (such as producers Kevin Feige and Avi Arad)? But they are, in fact, part of an intertwining series of films that the production company, Marvel Enterprises (yes, the same Marvel that first published these stories half a century ago) is planning to roll out over the next half-decade. Plans are in the works for films about Ant-Man, Thor, and Captain America, and in 2011, Marvel will release a unifying work, "The Avengers", which unites all of these characters.

It is only natural that this sort of cinematic web-weaving is being born of the comics. It is also not surprising that the first company to successfully introduce this multi-tiered super-franchise to Hollywood is Marvel, which only recently began to undertake the process of producing its own films. But why now? Superheroes have been featured in movies and television for many years. Aside from the limitations of rights-management and the risks involved in planning such an extensive series of films, why hasn't Hollywood attempted to create a franchise around a world (rather than around a character or team)?

I think that this has more to do with the audience than with the business of filmmaking. When these stories were introduced in the '60s, they were presented on the printed page. Comic books could be flipped through, referenced. There was a certain level of interactiveness associated with buying, reading and trading comic books that allowed people to follow the stories they liked, to pass on the narrative threads (or characters, or whatever) that they weren't interested in, and still get a sense of the larger picture. There was a universe, and you could pick who you were going to follow through that universe. Movies typically don't allow that kind of flexibility. A movie unravels itself one frame at a time. It's orderly and linear. But media is changing dramatically these days. I think that we're looking at things differently in part because of the way that we look at information. These days, everything seems to be hyperlinked. If you read a wikipedia article, and come across an unfamiliar term, chances are, you can click on the term, and be instantly presented with a new article about it. We can be studying about Ancient Rome, and link to an article on the Acropolis, which sends us to a page on ancient architecture, which sends us to a page on US government buildings, which links to a page on the cold war, which links to an article on ICBMs, which links to a page on Nuclear Physics, and then to Marie Curie, and from there to... Instead of taking in information linearly, in a fairly straight line from question to answer, we are offered (and increasingly take) the opportunity to follow divergent and convergent paths to the answers we seek. It does not disturb the natural flow of our thoughts to be on a news website, and seconds later, to find ourselves on YouTube, or browsing the results of a Google search. We are much more used to the idea that entirely separate, entirely different things can be connected in some way -- via this aptly named World Wide Web -- and as such, a webbed super-narrative is much more palatable.

At the end of "The Incredible Hulk", Robert Downey Jr. makes an appearance in the character of Tony Stark (of the fictional "Stark Industries" which figures lightly in this film, and which figures heavily in "Iron Man"). His appearance in character cements the interconnectedness of the two films, but has the brevity of a simple hyperlink. Each film stands on its own. Each tells a full, well-wrought story. But there are links, and the links promise to lead to more links, as new films emerge about this corner of the Marvel universe.

"The Avengers" promises to unite these disparate stories, but if the next decade of Marvel films follows the pattern of the comics, we may see the day when "The Avengers III" comes out months ahead of "Iron Man V", with the same actor playing the same character in both films, with complementary production design, and with the clear sense that each film takes us on its own narrative journey, but that they are all journeys within the same sphere.

I am very curious to see this develop, and to see how Hollywood reacts. Will there be attempts to create super-franchises outside of the pre-existing comic book worlds? Will this remain the realm of science fiction, or might it seep in to other genres as well? Since this kind of strategy is enormous in scale, it will probably be at least a decade before we know for sure whether these new kinds of narratives take root in Hollywood. In the meantime, it'll sure be interesting to see how Marvel paves the way.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-05-26T20:31:00.004-05:00

Spielberg meets Plato in Outer Space (or South America) -- Light, Knowledge, and the Crystal Skull

(Here Theyr Bee Spoylers)

I must admit here that I entered in to the theater today with the intention of thoroughly enjoying a piece of escapist cinema, trusting that the masterful team behind it would carry me far and away from the times and places I currently inhabit. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was very effective in that regard, but the back of my mind could not help but notice hints of a fascinating network of ideas that lurks beneath, behind and around the film's narrative.

We begin, like the other Jones films, with the famous Paramount mountain logo transforming in to the image of its twin. Here, it's a mound of dirt, from which emerges a ground hog or prairie dog (my weakness in zoological identification becomes apparent here). The image of a mountain becomes the image (and the diagetic fact) of a mole hill. It is a trick of perspective, reminding us that what we see has a lot to do with where we're looking from.

It is fitting that a film about an archaeologist explores ancient ideas. In this case, the first shot initiates a film-long and surprisingly intellectual examination of the Allegory of the Cave, a narrative devised by Plato in "The Republic", written about 2370 years ago.

Plato's story, told here on one foot, is about a group of prisoners chained to a wall in a cave. Their heads are forced in to one position, such that all they can see are the shadows cast on the cave's back wall. All the knowledge that these prisoners have is derived from the shadows they see on the wall. Though they do not know it, the actual truth is behind them, casting the shadows. According to Plato, if one of the prisoners were to escape, he'd be very disoriented at first, blinded by the light of the sun, by the sheer force of truth. After a while, this prisoner would acclimate to the bright light, and would return to the cave to free his fellows. Unfortunately, these poor souls would think their liberator completely out of his mind, unable to understand all of his stories of color, light, sound, and of the length, breadth and depth of the world.

Much like in Plato's allegory, Spielberg's films form strong bonds between light and knowledge. In Spielberg's narratives, a bright light often emanates from a source of knowledge (the ark in the first Indiana Jones film, the mothership in "Close Encounters"). Spielberg will often fire harsh beams of blue-white light directly in to the camera, too, when important information is conveyed to characters or to the audience (searchlights in "Schindler's List", flashlights in "Jurassic Park"). Whereas many of Spielberg's films explore this idea deep beneath their surface, the Indiana Jones films, and particularly this fourth film in the series, bring light and knowledge together much more overtly.

First, the connection between light and knowledge is established. As the film's first act reaches its climactic chase sequence, Indiana Jones, under duress, leads a group of communist spies to a box in a warehouse that contains the mysterious remains of a corpse. The remains have an odd effect on metals around them, almost like a magnetic force. As the communists lift the box and carry it away, large, hanging lights in the ceiling swing gently towards it (and, of course, towards the camera). Beams of light constantly turn towards the viewer as the moment of illumination, in which the contents of the box are revealed, approaches. This revelation, of course, becomes

There are many more moments like this. Later in the film, Jones and his adventuring partner have just discovered the long-lost tomb of seven conquistadors. The archaeologist excitedly works to cut through a conquistador's burial wrappings, and demands of his young partner, "give me some light". The light of an electric lantern glares brightly in to the lens in the next shot, as the face of the conquistador is revealed. This is a significant moment in the narrative, in that it lends credence to the legends that fuel the plot -- an element of the legend proves true, and as such, the rest of the legend has more credibility.

We find out later that the crystal skull, the object that all of the characters pursue, is itself somewhat of a light source, shimmering faintly from within. We also discover that it is considered a source of tremendous knowledge, an elongated skull with room for an over-sized brain.

As the film unfolds, we are presented with more and more images of light, eyes (such as a waterfall that emerges from a cliff shaped like a face, with cataracts flowing from its eyes... through which the adventurers must travel to find the lost city that they seek), and with the quest for knowledge (Jones and the boy who turns out to be his son argue about the value of an education, while Jones himself seems to have mixed feelings about the best ways to educate, deeply respecting an old professor who put him to sleep, while also suggesting to his students that they get out of the library for a while.)

These ideas merge overtly when the crystal skull is returned to its owner, some sort of otherworldly being. When Indiana Jones and his band get close to the skull's final destination, they are in the bowels of a large pyramid of sorts, a temple with descriptive paintings on the walls. Jones provides us with a brief interpretation that presents us with a new story, that of alien creatures with large heads descending to Earth and teaching this region's people new skills, ways to help their civilization establish itself and grow. At one point, the crystal skull is held up in front of a large painting of one of these visitors, and the skull's shadow falls plainly and evenly over the head of the figure in the painting. It is, in a way, Plato's allegory all over again -- a moment of revelation in which the projected shadow is that from which we learn.

Here, Spielberg begins his commentary on Plato's tale, turning the tables a bit on an ancient idea.

The skull turns out to belong to one of several crystalline skeletons of ancient creatures from Elsewhere. When the skull is returned, the creatures come alive. Irina, the film's super-villainous KGB agent, demands of these creatures to teach her everything. At this point, it seems as though she may get her wish. Though the building around her seems to undergo a cataclysmic transformation, she is transfixed by the crystal creatures, whose eyes link with hers by a shaft of wispy light. At first, she seems awed, but eventually, the knowledge overwhelms her, and though she says "I can see!", the light is blinding, and destroys her.

As Jones and the others escape, they run through a room full of ancient artifacts from all over the world. It is very similar to the warehouse in which the film begins, only here, the objects are not in crates and boxes -- they are open to the world, exposed to light.

Spielberg, as a filmmaker, is re-organizing Plato's cave, re-structuring the way knowledge is understood.

Light, in film, serves two technical purposes. First, it illuminates objects in a scene, so that they provide film or optical chips with enough material to create an image. Second, it creates the shaded and shaped shadows that form a projected image on a screen. The creation of a film is a marriage of both processes. A filmmaker both illuminates objects directly, and creates shadows on a screen for us to see -- shadows that look very much like the objects themselves. Amazingly, we are now living in a world where the shadows may contain more information than the beam of light that causes them. If we were to stand by the screen and look in to the projector's lens, we'd see bright streams of light, but there would be no story, no narrative, no message, no meaning. Ultimately, we still have to look away from the light to see that which it illuminates, regardless of which side of the camera, or which side of the cave's entrance we're on. Irina looks straight in to the light for knowledge, and is blinded by it. Jones looks at that which the knowledge created -- the monuments and artifacts of civilization, and is able to learn much more.

There is a lot more that can be said on this subject (bringing in the Communism/Capitalism aspects of the story, the insanity induced in Oxley by gazing in to the skull, the particularly striking view of the nuclear explosion early in the film, the idea of Jones being 'kept in the dark' about his participation in the unearthing of alien remains, Mutt Williams' discovery that he is Jones' son, etc. etc. etc.) but I am happy to give my readers an opportunity to explore the topic further in comments or critiques on this blog. I welcome your responses!

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Speed Racer

2008-05-11T15:41:00.002-05:00

I do not regret seeing "Speed Racer," even though it is indeed just as bad as the worst reviews claim it is. Yet again, the Wachowski brothers (of "The Matrix" fame) have presented us with a striking vision of cinema's potential without spending more than a moment's thought on narrative. Structurally, the story of Speed, second son of Ma and Pops Racer, is quite classical. Boy wants to be a racecar hero, boy finds out that the world 'aint what he thinks it is, boy defies conventions and changes the world. And that third act, in which Speed Racer competes in a Grand Prix with no motive other than to simply win the race, is straightforward and recognizable enough to be enjoyed... if you haven't walked out of the theater by that point. Unfortunately, all structural methodology seems to fall apart at that macro level. The Wachowski Brothers introduce several technical elements, including multi-image wipes (in which the face of a character wipes across the screen the way a straight line might have done in "Star Wars"), multi-layered images (with characters speaking in close-up in the foreground, and wheeling, rolling shots of the action whirl behind them), fancy computer-generated 'camera moves' around and over and under the racing and exploding cars, and a color palette that is much louder and more vibrant than any digital/live-action film in recent memory. Unfortunately, few of these effects serve any narrative end, and as such, they become obviously and painfully, as Macbeth puts it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Macbeth, Scene V)
Early in the film, the Wachowskis use an effect that, interestingly, does carry with it some narrative significance. In a race early in Speed's career, he approaches a record set eight years prior by his lost brother, Rex. To illustrate how close Speed is to breaking his brother's record, the Wachowskis don't rely on timers, counters, clocks, watches, or even on the ramblings of various race announcers. Instead, they show Rex's car, a ghostly shimmer on the race track, at times behind and at times ahead of Speed's white "Mach 5". This blending of time, an elision of eight years between the two races, a simultaneous depiction of both races on the same screen, within the same image, powerfully illustrates an important dramatic element of Speed's personality and motivation, and underscores one of the film's underlying tensions -- the threat and promise that Speed is almost exactly like his brother. I wish the Wachowskis would blend their technique and narrative like that more often. Alas, much of the flash in this film is wasted -- cars zoom around so fast, and with so little attention paid to character (even to the character of the cars themselves!) that there's very little left for a viewer to grab a hold of. The pace is so fast and so disorienting that its effect is to numb rather than engross. By contrast, the narrative scenes, in which characters talk, chatter, discuss, mourn, and celebrate, seem excruciatingly slow. The result is far from a smooth cruise through Speed Racer's world, but rather a lurching, binary slog, like a first-time driver behind the wheel of a stick-shift.

There is a beautiful metaphorical moment late in the film that illustrates both the Wachowski's ambition and their failure. In the third act, in Speed Racer's final race, the cars follow a path that takes them through a tunnel. As Speed enters the tunnel, the camera swings around to catch him in profile. Behind him, on the wall of the tunnel, is a long strip of images -- rectangles with the picture of a galloping zebra within them. As the camera pulls beside Speed, we can see those rectangles only one at a time, through the windshield of Speed's car. As those images flicker by, we see that, in fact, each zebra is slightly different, each one fraction of a moment ahead of the last in a suspended sort of gallop. The pictures flash by, and of course, we see them as a galloping zebra.

This is a visual quote of one of the origins of motion pictures, when Edweard Muybridge, to settle a bet, set up cameras along a racetrack and snapped a series of photographs of a galloping horse. Though Muybridge did not make a movie, the technology and concept of stringing a series of photographs together to illustrate movement began with him. In this image, the Wachowski's are acknowledging and perhaps boasting about their place in this technological history. They have taken Muybridge's horse and, effectively, they've put racing stripes on it. They've turned it in to a zebra. The missing element here, though, is the element of reality. Whereas Muybridge sought to find ways to see reality in a different way, the effects and techniques that the Wachowskis employ in "Speed Racer" merely offer a new depiction of fantasy -- they're little more than animation. Their "bullet-time" effect, invented for "The Matrix", is more comparable to Muybridge's galloping horse. Both techniques employ a string of still cameras to capture details of motion and perspective that the human eye is incapable of. The animation in "Speed Racer" is presented with a certain lack of conviction, as if the animators were insecure about whether any of their work would come across well. Animation does not need to represent the real world as we see it, but it is always presented with the challenge of depicting the real world as we feel it -- even if it is a world of the future, of the past, of animals, or even of fantasy. With a few individual scenes as exceptions, the Wachowskis have always struggled with this element of their special brand of creativity. There is technical wizardry at work, but behind it, there isn't even a clever illusionist.

"Speed Racer", like many of the big special effects films of the past few years, is a great example of why special effects must remain subsumed to narrative. It is an even more powerful example because of the creativity the Wachowskis bring to their special effects vision, which is not enough to replace good narrative, characters and good integration of the elements of cinema.

-AzS

Oscar Notes: The Nominees

2007-01-23T08:47:00.000-05:00

I find it interesting that there were no major splits this year. It often happens, when someone is nominated twice in a category (which people suspected might happen with Leo D. for his performances in "Blood Diamond" and "The Departed", and with Clint Eastwood for both "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Flags of our Fathers") that the person actually loses a lot of steam, because his or her votes get split across the two nominations. This year, though, Leo was nominated for his role in "Blood Diamond" (which was a better performance than his role in "The Departed") and Clint was nominated for directing "Letters from Iwo Jima", which, I'm told, is the better of his two films this year.

It's an interesting Oscar year, though, with lots of variety (none of that "Lord of the Rings" clogging up every category). There are a couple of independently created films ("Little Miss Sunshine" is nominated several times), some comedies (including Borat), war films, and other similarly depressing internationally-minded, ammunition-heavy fare ("Iwo Jima", "Blood Diamond"), and even some great sci-fi ("Children of Man"). Among the bunch, there's a lot of Mexican, Hispanic and Spanish stuff ("Volver", "Pan's Labrynth", "Children of Man", etc.), a sign of the shifting demographics of the film industry, perhaps?

It'll be an interesting contest, I'm sure. Don't want to predict any winners yet (I've got to see more of these films first), but I'm sure it'll be a close vote in some of the categories.

-AzS

Trailer Talk: "Casino Royale"

2006-10-17T11:15:00.000-05:00

I wish I knew why I get so excited when a new James Bond film is about to hit theaters. For a long time, I've suspected it has something to do with the gadgets (I was a HUGE "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" fan when I was very young, and I guess I must have sensed the presence of that magical car's creator, Ian Flemming, in the more mature Bond films)

I just took my first look at a long trailer for the new Bond film, "Casino Royale", with the new Bond, Daniel Craig. One of the things that fascinated me was a Halle Berry -esque shot of a swimsuit-clad person walking out of a perfect-blue resort-type ocean... but that person wasn't the typical "Bond Girl"... it was a muscular, shirtless James Bond himself. Certainly the ad campaign would be smart to target a wider demographic (aiming for the group of female twentysomethings to complement the series' predominantly male audience), but I wonder now, does the film itself aim for this shift? What struck me more was that the trailer didn't really feature the typical "Bond Girl" in the usual swimsuit or negligee or what have you. There's something shifting in the Bond world, and it's not just the new casting. The director, Martin Campbell, directed one of the better Bond films from the Brosnan era, "Goldeneye", so I remain hopeful.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Departed

2006-10-12T12:21:00.000-05:00

I was amazed at one moment in this film. It's a moment I can not write about without "spoiling" something, so I'll tiptoe around it (and those of you who don't trust that I can keep much of a secret, stop reading now).

I was amazed at how startling a gunshot can be in a movie.

In many movies, gunshots are quite common. There's even a moment in one of those "Hot Shots" films (the parodies of "Rambo") where it's just a whole lot of shooting, and on the screen, a tally of the hero's kills, rising like the score on a pinball game.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter was probably one of the first people to startle an audience with a gunshot, when he has a character point a pistol at the camera (and, as such, at the viewer), and fire a blank. The Movies were only about six years old at the time, so it's no wonder people were scared.

We've gotten rather dull about gunshots since then. They're just not surprising or startling much, anymore.

Scorsese managed to give gunshots a force that is not one of power, but one of wild lack of control. There is no way to stop a bullet without being stopped cold by that bullet, and when that gunshot rings out, it's not meant to be just another sound effect. It's piercing, loud, and committed.

I'd be curious to look and listen more closely to the gunshots in "The Departed", and to compare them to some other gunshots innovations of the past century -- especially gunshots in films such as "Schindler's List" or (the totally different) Indiana Jones films. Was it the narrative that made the gunshots in "The Departed" seem so much more deadly than in other films? Or was there some sort of trick of the eye, or trick of the ear, or editing finery that caused the effect? Anyone have any ideas?

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Thelma & Louise

2006-09-18T09:58:00.000-05:00

I saw Ridley Scott's 1991 film a few nights ago for the first time. It's a good film, and an important one, even if it leaves a guy like me frustrated with its portrayal of capital-emm Men. (there's one male character who might actually be a nice guy, perhaps, but he's just as sexist as the rest of 'em, in his own, quiet way...)

But I want to talk about something else, briefly. As I prepared to write this post, I typed the title of the film in to the "title" field as "Thelma and Louise", noticing only later that I should have used an ampersand instead.

The effect, though, is fascinating. It brings the two names more closely together, linking them in a way that is somehow different than the word "and". It provides a hint of what may be inseparability (which, in fact, fits the film nicely), whereas the word "and", as written, seems to connect two distinct, separate, individuated elements.

The ampersand can be found in various film and television titles, and I think that its effect is quite consistent: Law & Order, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Dumb & Dumber, Will & Grace, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Lilo & Stitch, Starsky & Hutch, Wallace & Gromit, etc. etc. etc.

Note the way the "And" feels in other titles: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Josie and the Pussycats, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Arsenic and Old Lace, Lady and The Tramp, Romeo and Juliet...

and of course, every so often, we find someone trying to be creative... Here, a symbol that seems to imply something other than what the "and" or the ampersand can imply: Romeo+Juliet, or the more recent Tristan+Isolde. It's a tighter connection, but an emptier one, too... perhaps more frantic, more hurried, two quick lines on a page, before time runs out...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Superman Returns

2006-07-25T19:45:00.000-05:00

"Superman Returns" is all about symbolic images, and that is quite fitting for a film with such a pop-cultural icon at its center. Plenty of other films have made heavy use of iconography and classical symbolism in the past, but few use so much of it so well (a good example of mis-use of classical symbolism can be found at the end of "Signs", when director M. Night Shyamalan turns a wonderful sci-fi story in to a Christian allegory, complete with Holy Water and a reincarnation) Director Bryan Singer's reliance on classical iconography is often obvious in "Superman Returns", but it is never blatant, and never disruptive. He begins by throwing the audience an early bone: Lex Luthor (the arch-villain, for those of you who are not so familiar with mythology) re-tells the myth of Prometheus in a sentence or two, and compares himself to the tragic, mythic character. From this point, once Bryan Singer has set up one myth-myth comparison, he is free to work with plenty of other parallels (and those in the audience who remember their studies might pick up on these additional textures). Superman, of course, is the central icon, the central image of the film, and of course, it is Superman who receives the greatest mythic treatment by Singer. At one point in the film, an earthquake dislodges the large, spinning globe that sits atop the skyscraper that houses "The Daily Planet". It's large, made of steel, and it threatens to crush lots of people below it. Singer knows that if Superman were to fly in and grab this large, plummeting globe from the top, it would be a moment in a film, but if Superman were to fly in under the falling globe and catch it on his shoulders, with his head at an angle and his arms straining to balance the thing, that would be Classic -- and not just classic, CLASSICAL. Superman is Atlas, known to the Romans as Titan. Yeah, This Guy. It's an image, and Singer knows it so well, he even has Sam Huntington (played by Jimmy Olsen), a news photographer with The Daily Planet, snap lots and lots of photos (significantly, Huntington's first "good" photos of the superhero). When Superman runs in to trouble late in the film, he falls from the sky, first with his feet straight and his arms stretched out (a cross, a Chrystological martyr-figure) then, as he falls, his arms and legs bend, and he approaches a fetal position, wrapped in his red cape, a more universal image. And as I watched this moment in the film (not quite a scene, more than a shot), I couldn't help but think of Icarus, whose flight took him too close to the sun, melting his wax wings...

This dedication to images -- classical interwoven with modern -- is what made "Superman Returns" really work for me. Singer knew well that Superman needs to be iconic, and he was smart to make full use of the powerful mythic icons the Western literary canon offered.

**********************************

An entirely separate note from the film.

A scene that struck me very much comes early. Lex Luthor, after stealing alien crystals from Superman's secret, polar hideaway, discovers that even a tiny speck of one crystal, when put in to water, reacts very powerfully and catastrophically. To demonstrate this, he has one of his cronies drop a grain of this crystal in to a "lake" -- a model lake, to be precise, in a beautiful, elaborate model railroad setup (a "model railroad pike", if I recall the terminology correctly). The crystal, when placed in water, grows very quickly and destructively, pushing through anything in its way. In this particular case, it throws the entire model city in to an earthquake-chaos, and Bryan Singer thrusts us right down in with the model citizens, watching the model trains crash and burn from the two-inch eyelevel of the plastic, painted figurines. This in itself is a creative way to demonstrate the impact of what Lex Luthor has in mind (the ultimate use of the full-size crystals), but it's not everything. Watch the scene and listen carefully. There are sounds of trains, of explosions, even, amazingly, of people screaming. It's a model, and it looks like a model, but in an odd way, it attains the gruesomeness of "the real thing".

This scene impressed me not just because it was a clever way to convey an idea, but also because it seems as though every filmmaker who had a train set as a kid spent at least some time trying to do something cinematic with it. Spielberg, it is said, made movies with his trains, and if you look through my old videotapes from middle school (or even early in high school, really), you'll find my own train set among the footage. I've seen model trains in movies, but this really was the first time that I've seen a model train used in a film the way a kid with a train set might imagine it being used -- and it's used very successfully.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Stepford Wives (1975)

2006-06-24T21:45:00.000-05:00

So I've finally seen "The Stepford Wives" (the original one, from 1975), and boy, is it creepy!

It's a somewhat dated film, but, after seeing it, I sort of got really peeved at the Frank Oz re-make from not too long ago. Oz turned it in to some sort of sordid comedy, whereas the original was really, truly, honestly creepy (as it should have been!)

One thing about it that struck me as a bit dated (thank G-D, too) was the "men are evil" attitude that it presented -- all of the men in Stepford (which is really little more than a stand-in for the rest of the civilized world) are selfish, ambitious, domineering and violent when it comes to women -- all they want is a sexual-satisfyer who will also keep the house neat, keep the kids well-trained and stay out of the way of business and other assorted "manly" things. I'm glad that men are being viewed a little more fairly these days than they used to be (I recently read "Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent, which seems to be a part of a re-balancing trend...)

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Nacho Libre

2006-06-24T21:27:00.000-05:00

Parodies can be wonderful, but they're tough to pull off well. Nacho Libre is a fight-movie parody, in some ways transplanting the narrative from the Far-East, where such films often originate, to a sort of timeless, quintessential Mexican Nowheresville.

Nacho Libre, embodied here by Jack Black, is a Mexican wannabe-wrestler, whose life as a friar in an orphanage leaves much (including a pretty nun -- played by Ana de la Reguera) to be desired.

There's a lot of potential for humor here, but somehow, moments that could be riotously funny just aren't. There are some good chuckles, here and there, but to my mind, the film's greatest error is that although it is a fight-film parody, the fight scenes themselves are the least funny parts of the film!

When you think of a war film, you might think of battle scenes, but you'd also think of generals rallying their troops, soldiers commiserating in foxholes, etc. In a parody of a war film, all of those elements have to be transfigured in to something really funny, really hysterical (and of course, this is not the same as a comedy about war, a-la M*A*S*H -- only of parodies of serious movies about war). Since "Nacho Libre" is a parody of fight films, the elements that one thinks of in a fight film (especially the fight sequences that are always central to fight films) need to be funny.

There are a few notable elements to "Nacho Libre", though, that are interesting, but which have nothing to do with the content or quality of the film. There are a few sequences of un-translated, un-subtitled Spanish in the film, which, to a non-speaker of Spanish, were rather startling in a political and not-at-all-funny sort of way. Those segments, unlike untranslated or un-subtitled segments in other films, were presented as if they contained something important (that is, they were not background chatter), but non-speakers of Spanish were left (intentionally) out of the loop. It was as if the film were punishing non-speakers for not knowing Spanish (remember, I paid to see a film, anticipating that I would be able to understand it -- it's true of foreign films, too -- I pay to see them with subtitles, after all). If I know that a film is in a language other than English, I expect to be warned if it is not going to be translated in some way, so that I don't waste my money on a ticket to a film I won't understand.

And I'm not opposed to having extended sequences of American films done in other languages. I think "Traffic" was a triumph of multi-lingual film. But of course, with "Traffic", the subtitles were essential to those of us whose Spanish is limited to the digits from one to nine.

It's stuff like that, when a film tries to snub its audience, that makes me a little squeamish.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Mortal Storm

2006-06-10T22:34:00.000-05:00

This is an obscure film, and that is exactly what is surprising about it.

Here's what it's about:

-A German family, comprised of an Arian mother, Arian children and a Jewish step-father, gets slowly and agonizingly torn to pieces during Hitler's rise to power.

Here's what it contains:

-Frightening and accurate scenes of Germans being moved and inspired by the Nazi propaganda machine -- in some cases, inspired to do violence and injustice to the people who they once admired and loved.
-Unequivocal condemnations of Nazi social policies, especially pertaining to concepts of 'racial purity'.
-Images of characters in a Concentration Camp

Here's what's so surprising:

This film was produced and released in 1940.

There is a great deal of talk about how Hollywood never really addressed antisemitism in its films until "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947) (in which the Holocaust is mentioned almost as an aside), and the Holocaust itself doesn't really become a serious topic until "The Pawnbroker" (1964) (with occasional films that handled the issue at arm's length, like "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959)). But here, a film about the Holocaust that was released before the general public really had any clear sense of what was going on!

The scenes of the concentration camp are particularly surprising, because this was a time when no images, moving or otherwise, were available to anyone, anywhere, of the camps. It's just about the only historical image that is not accurate in the film (they got their uniforms perfect! Even "Schindler's List" didn't do that!) but it's pretty frighteningly close, right down to the spotlights on towers, the tall, ominous fencing, and the forced labor.

After seeing this film, I was filled with questions:

How did they know? (apparently the film was based on a book of the same title, which was written several years earlier!) There is so much in the film that is so accurately portrayed... it's amazing that the director, Frank Borzage, somehow managed to get it all right...

How was the film received? I wish I could find reviews -- did people realize that it was all true, or did they see it as a fiction? To what extent were American moviegoers aware of what was going on in Europe in 1940, and how much did this affect the way they received the film?

Why is it so obscure? It seems to me that "The Mortal Storm" should have much more significance in today's discourse on important Hollywood films. Aside from its subject matter, it is an exceptionally well-crafted film (it's very much a high-craft Stuido picture, right from the beginning), so there seems to be really no reason not to consider it quite highly. Evidence of its general obscurity includes the fact that IMDB has the wrong picture on the film's page, and it is not available on DVD anywhere.

I've found the VHS version of this film at only two libraries in Eastern Massachusetts, so if you're around here, you may have to fight to get ahold of it. If you're interested in examples of a more activist Hollywood, or if you are interested in the first Hollywood reaction to the Holocaust (which had barely begun at the time!), this is an absolutely necessary film.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: X-Men: THe Last Stand

2006-05-28T18:25:00.000-05:00

More can be said for conviction than one might expect. The third film in the "X-Men" trillogy, "The Last Stand" delivers only some of what it promises.

Remembering the first X-Men film, which was made and released in pre-9/11 America, I recall finding it refreshingly slow -- an action film that was more about characters and concepts than the typical action film. Although it suffered in the same way that any first-in-a-series film suffers (it has to squeeze a lot of back-story in to two short hours), it gave me a good sense that an interesting, complex world had been created, and that subsequent films would make good use of that world.

The second X-Men film is the reason for the first line of this post. "X-Men United" was a film made by a team that believed what they were doing. Whereas the first X-Men film was a foray in to new, uncharted territory, the second X-Men film was approached with the confidence of people who knew what they were doing -- who knew what world they were in. It was a surprising film in that it came at a time when we still believed that sequels are never as good as their predecessors -- X-Men 2 is partially responsible for deconstructing that belief.

X-Men 3 concludes the story (although the parting shot leaves us wondering about what happens next, there are clearly no plans for yet another X-Men film, nor should there be.) Sadly, whereas the first X-Men film successfully built the world, and the second successfully textured that world's deep, painful dramas, this third X-Men film (directed by Brett Ratner, rather than Bryan Singer (who helmed the first two films, and whose work we'll be seeing soon, when "Superman Returns")) is back where the first one began -- unsure of itself, unsure of the rules, and unsure of the real root and heart of the story. A story's ending is like the end of a gymnastics routine -- it has to stick, and in order to stick, it has to be told with conviction. A storyteller who does not believe the ending of his story is in trouble from the start.

What does lack-of-conviction look like on screen? For the most part, it comes across in performances. When the incomparable Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen sound like they're acting, it's a good hint that someone (probably the director) isn't so sure what he wants, and as a result, the actors can't be sure of their characters anymore. But it also comes in inconsistencies, and this particular film, especially the ending of this particular film, happens to contain inconsistencies that are simiply inexplicable (and here I mean narrative inconsistencies, not the occasional mistakes of continuity that can creep in to a production).

I do not believe that "X-Men" went 'one film too far'. I just wish that the production's footing was more sure before the film was produced.

-AzS

Trailer Talk: World Trade Center

2006-05-27T23:34:00.000-05:00

When I saw the trailer to Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" at the screening of "The DaVinci Code", I was struck by two things:

1) It makes the film look very commercial, the way that some of the "United 93" trailers made that film appear. "United 93", thankfully, turned out to be very tastefully, delicately, and powerfully constructed. "World Trade Center" might turn out to be an excellent film (Oliver Stone is no slouch), but I wonder about it... One of the things that made "United 93" work is that it is a very limited film -- it's about one aspect of the events of one particularly eventful day. The film is so dedicated to its story-within-a-larger-story that we never even see the towers fall (for me, and I imagine, for many people, the difinitive moment of that day's experience). "World Trade Center", by its title, and by the preview, focuses on those towers, and on the rescue personnel who went in to try to keep the worst from happening. Approaching this type of story, a question is begged: The events of September 11 were terrible to watch from a distance -- the story of the witness-from-the-living-room can be chilling and dramatic enough -- so why do we need to go inside (and if you look at the trailer, we do go inside the building, in to what appears to be its lobby, as it is coming down. Even in the trailer! The Naudet Brothers' documentary on 9/11 included footage from inside one tower as the other tower collapsed, and most of that footage was utter darkness. If Oliver Stone asked himself this question, then I suspect that the film will have an answer.

2) You need to see this trailer in theaters in order to understand what I mean by this point, because computer screens won't get it: They matched the weather. I don't know how the heck they did this, but they matched the weather. I was in the Boston area in September, 2001, and the weather on that particular day was pretty much identical between Boston and New York. One of the first things that struck me as I watched this preview was that the color of the air somehow matched my recollections. This was something that I noticed in "United 93" as well -- the color of the weather (call it color saturation, call it color-balance, call it what you want) matched my memories. And the absolutely fascinating thing is that between "United 93" and "World Trade Center", you have two very different approaches to the way that particular day looked, but both seem equally true-to-the-original. I think that the key to why this works lies in the way each film sets up what "outside, during the day" means. The outdoors of New York City of each film is an outdoors in relation to an indoors. The exteriors are contrasted with interiors. I suspect that the reason both "United 93" and this "World Trade Center" trailer seem to accurately mirror my memories of that day's weather (despite the differences between the films' "look") is that both films are very concscious of making the day look a certain way -- bright, sunny, cloudless... and each film approaches the exteriors by contrasting them with interiors, and by matching the visual style of the exteriors to the visual approach to the interiors. Okay, this is getting a little technical. In "United 93", there's a lot of grainy, over-exposed stuff, even on the interiors of buildings. The colors are muted, but the whites are harsh. When we see the outdoors in that film, they are even brighter -- it all looks as though someone pointed a camera without adjusting to the fact that it's such a bright, sunny day. And that makes it seem even brighter and sunnier. "World Trade Center", judging by the trailer, is shot in a bit of a more standard way, with cleaner, crisper film stock, and with a better balance of colors... so its approach to what that type of weather looks like involves emphasizing the blue of the sky, and emphasizing the effects of sunlight on different colors (making them more vibrant, more 'alive'). I can't know how much of this is true without speaking with the postproduction supervisors of both films (they would be the ones in charge of conveying color conversations from the director to the people who actually handle color correction and all of that.)

One more interesting note on the trailer comes from The Professor, and can be found here: http://nightspore.livejournal.com/146457.html

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The DaVinci Code

2006-05-27T22:11:00.000-05:00

There are many new films these days that begin with baggage. Some are sequels, entering theaters only to face a crowd of comparers -- an audience that is all too eager to go home, to tell friends "it was better than the first one". Some are re-makes, with the same problem: "It was better than the original" is the best they can hope for (and the least likely of possible outcomes).

"The DaVinci Code" comes with its own baggage, of course. Many moviegoers will be eager to compare it to the book, itself a sequel.

I have seen several reviews of "The DaVinci Code" that claim that it does stand on its own quite well (that it is not one of those films where if you didn't read the book, you won't understand the movie). Why is this assertion so necessary so often? There have been quite a few big hits lately that are literarily-inspired, from the Harry Potter films to the Lord of the Rings trillogy. Those films didn't require a familiarity with their source-material. Why do people keep expecting this?

Perhaps it's the sequence that does it.

People assume that sequels necessitate a familiarity with the film which they follow. You have to see film #1 before you see film #2. That is always the order of things: thing #1 has to come before thing #2. You have to see the original before you see the remake (or, at least, that used to be the way of it. How many people who saw Peter Jackson's "King Kong" made a point of seeing the Cooper/Schoedsack original?) It seems to be the same with books -- you have to read the book before you see the movie.

Interestingly, this idea wasn't originally a matter of understanding.

Of course, movies are made in such a way that they can stand on their own -- even sequels, nowadays, are structured so as to appeal to an audience that is broader than that of their preceding film. Movies based on books, too, are made so that you don't have to read the book. They have to be, especially in a culture that tends to watch movies more than read books.

So why do people seem to ask "will I understand it if I haven't read the book"?

I don't really know the answer to this. Certainly with the "Lord of the Rings" films, knowing the books meant knowing a richer backstory (but not necessarily a necessary one, as far as the films themselves are concerned). "The DaVinci Code", though, is a very dense film that stays very true to the book it is based on (at least, very little is added, even if one or two moments are taken away). But even with "The DaVinci Code", if it were a film that you could only understand if you had read the book, it would be failing as a film. And this is true of any book-based film. Movies are supposed to stand on their own.

A coda pertaining to the third installment in the new Star Wars trillogy: Here is an example of an intentional deviation from this unspoken "rule" of cinema. In the third installment of the new Star Wars trillogy (this would be the sixth Star Wars feature, then), there is an entire battle sequence with a robotic creature that seems to come out of nowhere. Apparently, this sequence is really the conclusion of an entire narrative that takes place between that film and the film before it -- a narrative that is explained in a short graphic novelette (a part of George Lucas' franchise, of course). Is it fair to put the end of this episode in to a film in such a prominent way without explaining the backstory (even in a rudimentary way) within that same film? some have suggested that in doing so, Lucas has developed a new form of movie -- one that takes advantage of the age of multimedia -- by incorporating multiple media sources and bridging one narrative across them. Imagine, then, a story that is told partially through a book, partially through a movie, partially through a radio show, and partially through a play, where you have to go through all of those media in the right order to get the story straight. It strikes me as an interesting idea at first, but also as a tiring one. What's the point, other than to make more money by selling more tickets for one story? It might be interesting to have a narrative presented in a book that will only conclude on screen, but only if I can get both for the price of one, and only if I can somehow get them at the same time, or in the same way. It forces too much work on the viewer/reader/listener to be a practical concept, as far as I can tell.

But who knows? Perhaps there will come a visionary mediamaker at some point who will be able to combine all of these different modes of narrative expression in to a coherent, multimedia narrative? I'm sure people are striving towards that end already, so it's probably a matter of time before it happens.

Meanwhile, movies based on books will still be made so that you don't have to read the book to understand the movie.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: A Scanner Darkly

2006-05-10T19:57:00.000-05:00

I got a chance to see this, Richard Linklater's latest, in what is probably close to the best setting for it -- on a college campus. I say this is close to the best setting because I imagine it as much more of a dorm-room film, something a bunch of sophomores would excitedly watch in groups of five or six at three in the morning.

I like it when Philip K. Dick's narratives get translated to the screen ("Blade Runner" and "Minority Report" are, admittedly, the only two I've seen thus far, but I have vague memories of catching parts of "Total Recall" on TV a while back...) but I guess what I like is the noir-ish ambiguity of the future that defines "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report"... If "A Scanner Darkly" had been made in that sort of way, perhaps it would have impressed me more... As it was, though, it came across as sort of a middle-aged-hipster-meets-The-Future type of movie... sort of an answer to the question "What if the guys from 'Dazed and Confused' grew up in the future?" with weird politics and a twist ending that might have been fascinating had it been closer to the point of the film...

What was the point of the film? I can't quite tell. It might have had a pro-drug sort of message, or, at least, an anti-drug, pro-druggie message, or, perhaps an anti-drug, anti-druggie, pro-experimenting-with-drugs message, or... see, it sort of loses itself in itself. After the screening, several students commented to me that just watching the film (rendered in a weird, quasi-animation type of styling (much like Linklater's "Waking Life")) gave them the sense that they should wait an hour before driving home.

I've seen movies about drugs in the future, and I've seen them better -- 'THX1138' is, interestingly, the first to come to mind. Interestingly, both films have the drugs being provided by an overwhelmingly powerful entity that intends to weild those drugs as a method of controlling and profiting off of a large part of the population...

Another recent film, 'V for Vendetta' (which I hated, but which had elements that I loved) takes this sort of tack, but approaches it in an extraordinarily different (but frighteningly similar) way, to good effect (perhaps that's the next film I'll write about?)

Ultimately, 'A Scanner Darkly' didn't settle. Perhaps this was its purpose? The undercover police force in the film goes around in pattern-shifting suits, so no officer can be identified, even by other members of the force. It's both hard to watch and fascinating (and sometimes, it's so captivating as to trump the significance of whatever the character in the suit is saying). Is that unsettlingness the point? I don't think so -- in a film where nothing is settling, somehow, even unsettlingness itself never quite solidifies as a central theme or concept, and I'm not sure why. Although "Dazed and Confused" was very similar, it got to its point much more clearly, as I recall. Perhaps there has to be clarity in order for non-clarity to be apparent, and quiet for dis-quiet. Perhaps that is at the center of what's missing. There's lots of talk about a good, clean, happy world going berserk in the film, but all we see is a film gone berserk, and it's not set far enough in the future for me to believe that between now and then there was a time of relative peacefulness and harmony. If it were set a thousand years from now, rather than maybe twenty, perhaps I might have found it compelling (and with all of that new, weird technology, perhaps I would have found my disbelief more easily suspended).

-AzS

Musing Pictures: United 93

2006-05-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, I know, I know, it's too early to make a film about the events of September 11... or, at least, that's what I keep hearing.

I know that people aren't forgetting that, in fact, there was plenty of filmmaking going on about that difficult day very quickly after the events themselves took place. There was even "9/11", a striking, moving documentary about the whole ordeal that was completed by March, 2002, and broadcast on national television on the one-year anniversary of the attacks (http://http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312318/). It was nominated for five Emmy awards (and won two of them). And how many documentaries have there been about it since then? A few hundred? A thousand?

"But those are documentaries!" some might say, arguing that this somehow gives them more credibility. Take a look at one of the Emmys that "9/11" took home -- "Outstanding Sound Mixing for Non-Fiction Programming (Single or Multi-Camera)" It's an incredible mix, but let that be a reminder to all of us that even when we're watching a documentary, what we hear is rarely a "document" of the sounds of what we're seeing. In some ways, it can be the best kind of historical fiction.

But I digress. There is a new film out now, "United 93", directed by Paul Greengrass (yes, the guy behind "The Bourne Supremacy") and it doesn't pretend to be a "document" of the events themselves...

So, perhaps, here's a point of comparison: Documentaries try to portray truth as-it-is, or as-it-was -- 'show the historical film, show the "experts" talking about the historical film (although, to its credit, "9/11" has no "experts"), present all the visual materials as "evidence" of something, and then make your point.'

The fear about "United 93" is the fear about any fiction that attempts to tell history as narrative: In the conversion from history to narrative, certain details are lost, and certain interpretations that do not exist in the threads of fate make their way in to the storytelling. This happens to be true about documentaries, but for some reason, this doesn't bother people as much.

Now, yes, I do feel that it is too soon for certain treatments of the 9/11 attacks -- a "Towering Inferno" or "Poseidon Adventure" type of approach (i.e. '70s disaster film with an ensemble cast and a happy ending except for the death of someone we like) would be awfully disrespectful (yes, the date and its events have attained a certain secular sacredness, it seems), but "United 93" stays very clear of all of that.

In some ways, "United 93" acheives something that documentaries can not acheive (some might say that they can, on rare occasions, but I have yet to see it). It tells the history as fiction, allowing the viewer to enter the scene as one enters a story -- without concern for one's own well-being, because stories aren't real -- the monsters can't hurt us. When we see a documentary, we know that we are seeing something real (even if it isn't), whereas when we see a fictional narrative film (especially a Hollywood film, and especially in the theater), we know that we are seeing something that is ultimately fake (even if it isn't).

Much of the cast of "United 93" is composed of people playing themselves. Air traffic controllers, military leaders and mid-level bureaucrats in the film are often not actors, not even re-enactors, but the actual people who were involved in the actual events on which the film is based. In a documentary, they would be talking to us directly, through the screen. We can not feel what they felt -- even if the scene is re-enacted in a documentary. On the other hand, if these were all actors in the scene, re-enacting the experiences of people not-themselves, we might feel empathy for the characters as we watch, but the "this is fiction" safety net is always there for us to fall back on if we need it. Fascinatingly, since we are in a movie theater, and since we know this to be a Hollywood film, we let ourselves deep in to its fiction, only to discover that the fictionality of it is very thin -- thinner than even a very carefully researched re-enactment, because many of the re-enactors act from first-hand experience. It becomes a much more emotionally dangerous film because it is almost participation -- certainly it is closer to participation than a documentary could provide.

So, is it too soon for this film to happen?

Imagine if a film were made before 1950 about the Holocaust with survivors or liberators or what have you honestly and genuinely returning to the "scene" of the crime, re-creating it for the rest of the world to see, understand and remember. Imagine how much more powerful it would be than even the best documentaries or the most careful, sensitive re-creations. I am thinking now to the future -- fifty years or so, let's say. Sure, there will be plenty of folks who remember the events of September 11, 2001, but how many of them will remember well enough to act their reactions out, to demonstrate the shock of it? Will there ever be actors who can "fake" it well enough for anyone to understand? Despite all the films about Pearl Harbor, do any of us who do not remember that day have even the foggiest idea of how shocking it was?

I can't speak for every piece of fictionalization that will be coming out about the 9/11 attacks over the course of the next few years, but I can say that "United 93" could not have waited a moment longer. It is a closer account of the events than just about any documentary (perhaps with the exception of the Naudet Brothers' film), and it is a more involving and more directly emotional account than I expect any films could be many years from now, because the people who made it, who are in it, were in it.

And of course, none of this has anything to do with the goings-on on the airplane itself, which, of course, is somewhere near the center of the film... Perhaps I'll leave that for another conversation.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Truman Show

2006-02-07T22:04:00.000-05:00

Peter Weir caught my attention a little late. When I saw "Master and Commander" several years ago, I was struck by his ability to tell a swashbuckler of a story with hefty visual effects (and with both visual and narrative confinement) without losing track of the characters. At the time, Weir's name was fairly new to me -- I had not seen any of his earlier, equally well-known films (like "Witness" and "Galipoli"), and "Dead Poets Society" never really struck me as being all that great (I remember it as being engaging, but really quite slow. I wonder how I'd feel about it now that I am probably a decade or so older than I was when I saw it last). "The Truman Show" was one of his more popular films which I had also not seen. (I admit, I did see "The Mosquito Coast", and I found it quite odd... I've only now realized the connection, though.)

It was interesting, seeing "The Truman Show" in the age of 'Reality TV', especially considering the film was released two years before "Survivor" took American television by storm. I liked that it was not as angry a film as it would be today -- there is a clear "good" and "bad", but not a polarization of it. Here's what I mean:

Truman lives his little life in relative comfort in front of all those (5000 or so) cameras. His producer, Christof (Ed Harris), seems to love him, and not just because of all the ratings and all the money and all the power. Yes, it is clear that Truman's life is a bad thing, ultimately, and that when Christof finally loses his power over Truman (i.e., when Truman finally leaves), that is a good, positive development in the grand scheme of things. But it is also clear that Truman is walking in to a world where he will never again be able to lead a private, small-town life (of all ironies... he's stepping away from the cameras, only to face an international mob...) When Christof tells him that the world beyond the TV "set" (not the television, but the set on which the show is shot) is cruel and dangerous, he's right. And the fascinating thing is that he's speaking almost as an overprotective father (and in some ways, he is more a father to Truman than the man Truman believes is his father -- that father, after all, is just an actor. Christof really means it.) Yes, there are moments when the good/evil line seems more clearly drawn... but only barely. Truman, on a boat, racing towards the edge of his world, inspires Christof to call down a storm (get off the boat, Jonah!) which threatens Truman's very life. Are we to believe from this that Christof wants Truman dead? I think not. Ed Harris pulls off an excellently understated performance here... he's not just an overprotective father, but he is a proud one. Earlier in the film, he concedes that if Truman were ambitious enough, the gig would be up absolutely. Here, Christof does that very traditional father-son thing -- he throws Truman in to the water to see if he'll swim.

And Truman swims, and Truman finds the end of the world, and crosses its threshold. Christof looks disappointed, but not in the usual supervillain sort of way. There's no thrashing about, no angry retorts, no firing the guys whose neglegence allowed Truman to escape... There's just a sigh of sorts. His son has grown up, has left the house, has gone beyond his control... and his show just ended. Time for retirement, I guess. It's resignation that I see in the performance, and I really like that -- it's something we can all identify with, in a way.

I'm afraid that today, there is so much animosity towards "reality TV", especially in the realm of fiction-narrative filmmaking, that "The Truman Show" could never be made well now. Christof would be too cynical, too uncaring about anything other than revenue, and Truman's life would be too pitiful...

Movies with a message are tricky. I tend to gravitate towards those where the message is mild, and as such, real. When films are too angry, or too ham-fisted about the point they seem to want to convey, I get nervous. They are coins with only one side. I don't mind good and evil -- heck, there are some great films out there with good and evil -- but even Vader has some good in him, and Luke Skywalker knows more of the dark side than he'd like to believe...

And of course, the philosopher in me loves all the metacinematic possibilities in "The Truman Show"... there's even a TV-show-within-a-TV-show-within-a-movie... and there's an actor who is playing a non-actor surrounded by actors... an actor as a non-actor? Fascinating! It calls to mind that usual question of how much of cinema is real, and how much is imagined? It's a trickier question than you might think.

-AzS

No. No. No. No. No. Yes.

2006-01-30T21:49:00.000-05:00

It is I, Smeliana, here yet again. You thought I'd disappeared. In fact, I just have a job and an active social life. I know. I know. I'm sorry. But I'll try to make it up to you. I just saw When Harry Met Sally, again. And, if I may spoil the inevitable but brilliant romantic comedy ending, I'll pontificate for a moment.

I'm going to assume that we all know the movie. And it's wonderful. It's fabulous. The comic timing, the editing, the pacing, the colors, the juxtopositions, the split screens, the racial/ethnic undertones, the City are all incredible. Just so good.

Harry and Sally are just complex enough that the film can hold up over time and it has several canonical scenes spurring debates throughout the ages. (I mean, the movie is almost 17 years old. That's practically FOREVER.) I'm in no mood to pander to you and tell you all of the ways in which this film is gold. I have a very specific question.

What's with the ending?

Harry comes to his senses and realizes exactly what he's supposed to realize; he loves Sally and wants to be with her. He even spouts a perfect "I Love You" Monologue:

I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

How much do I want someone to say that to me? Hell, I could even write it beforehand and give it to him; I wouldn't want him to strain himself. My response (and Sally and I are VERY similar) would be to promptly pick myself up off the floor (I would have buckled at "sleep at night"), grab him, kiss him, and say, "Really? Go on..."

But no. Not Sally. She says that she hates him. She hates him because he says things that make it impossible to hate him. At this point, I'm with her, a bit. Alright, Sally. You want to be mad. Mad is a graspable emotion. It makes sense and has a standard protocol. It's fun to hold onto. There's always something to do. But he's so great, and so you're struggling. Rightly so. Struggle, struggle, struggle.

But then she just repeats, "I hate you. I hate you. [shakes head, tears up, and mouths again] I hate you." And then he kisses her! And they kiss! And then you have the pullback to the crowd and the cut to them discussing their marriage and happiness.

Am I the only one who finds this disconcerting? Do I hate conflict that much? Why does he kiss her? She just told him she hates him! Shouldn't that wound him a bit? Shouldn't he care if she hates him? Or shouldn't he worry that she still wants to hate him? If I confessed my love to my best friend and then he said he hated me and started to cry, I couldn't kiss him. I would cry too. "What did I say? What did I do wrong? I love you!"

The repeated, "I hate you" would just be such a blow to my ego that I couldn't kiss him right after. Is Harry cockier than I am? Is he so confident that she can't cancel out his determination? Is this a case of "when you know, you know"? Is love when both of you understand that the words coming out of your mouth are false?

I don't know how I feel about that. Maybe I've never had true love. Maybe I'm more emotionally specific than most people. Maybe my skin is too thin. But I don't think I could kiss someone after they say they hate me.

And what does it mean that it's okay that he did it? What kinds of gender ramifications does it have? "Don't listen to the crazy woman. She doesn't know what she's talking about! Kiss her! Win her!" Could it ever work the other way? He would say, "I hate you" and that would be it. Over.

Do you think this is unsettling?

Musing Pictures: "The 40 Year Old Virgin"

2006-01-30T13:42:00.000-05:00

Comedy is tough. Whenever I see a comedy that I enjoy, it occurs to me that I should pay more attention, because comedy is tough.

"The 40 Year Old Virgin" is a comedy of awkwardness, in the way that everything from Charlie Chaplin to Mr Bean is comedy of awkwardness. The nice thing about the film's star, Steve Carell, is that he manages to pull off some true, genuine sentiment, in a way that is closer to Chaplin (or, really, to Buster Keaton, who, I feel, is better at it, because of his face). Despite its bawdy subject matter, the film really comes across as a pleasant, genuine little story, and it's Carell who is responsible for that.

Perhaps seeing a similarity to Buster Keaton isn't as farfetched as I thought it would be a few sentences ago. As I think on it, the film does include some physical, chase-related comedy (in cars, on bikes, on foot, etc.) and throughout it, the funniest part is Carell's face. His gift for comedic expression is remarkable, especially considering how quickly other actors over-emphasize their reactions to get a cheap laugh.

To my mind, there's something very intricate about comedy, and somewhere tied in to that intricacy is the supremacy of subtlety in comedic arts. I think that's why I prefer Keaton to Chaplin (although Chaplin knew extremely well the importance of subtlety, as well). I think that's why "Old Stoneface" Keaton hasn't been matched by other physical comedians/stuntment like Jackie Chan (who is quite funny, but not as sublime).

No, Carell is not a stuntman, as far as I know, but his ability to not only control his face, but to understate his own expression is where I feel he is most like Keaton. I wonder what his career will look like down the road. Comedians with highly over-expressive faces (Robin Williams, Jim Carrey etc.) have been attempting transitions to non-comic forms (Williams has been more successful, it seems... Jamie Foxx has been most successful of any of them). A subtle, under-expressive face seems more at home in drama than comedy, so I wonder, twenty years from now, when Carell is tired of that Same Old Thing, what will his dramas look like?

Also, a side-note on the film: It looks like a sitcom -- the lighting, the sets, even the staging of characters. Interestingly, the cinematographer (Jack N. Green) has had almost no interaction with television at all (although he was cinematographer for the cinematic adaptation, "Serenity", which had its origins on TV). The director, of course, (Judd Apatow), is a veteran of the television world, and a relative newby to the big screen (this is his first stint as director...)

-AzS

Musing Pictures: "It's a Wonderful Life"

2006-01-18T09:49:00.000-05:00

I was introduced to the film "It's a Wonderful Life" at a production meeting, of all places.

The fellow who suggested that I see the film introduced it roughly like this: "When it begins, you'll think there's absolutely no way this film can work, but you'll see, by the time it's over, it kicks like a mule."

Like a mule? I was curious.

Frank Capra's film, which has become an annual holiday event of sorts on TV (though it's much reduced, usually, when it is broadcast), begins with a conversation between a twinkly light in the sky, and another twinkly light in the sky. These are angels, discussing the saving of a poor fellow named George Bailey from his intended suicide. You'd think you were watching some bad, early Hallmark telefilm.

But here's the thing. Capra takes it all totally seriously.

We see the town (Bedford Falls). We see kids playing. We see George Bailey's story unfold (and the role is completely inhabited by Jimmy Stewart), and Capra takes everything in as matter-of-factly as he possibly can. To Capra, this is not schlock. This is important. And that makes it all the easier for us to take it seriously.

I found myself buying in to the film's premise quite quickly, and, in fact, being rather taken by it -- moved to the verge of tears by the end (which is something very few movies can do to me).

I spent some time, after seeing the film, pondering Spielberg. He said, once: "Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films. They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It's A Wonderful Life and The Searchers" (http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/biographies/steven_spielberg_biog/5)

That's an interesting spread of films, and "It's a Wonderful Life" fits in there in an interesting way -- it is the most heartwarming, the most uplifting of the films. Strangely, the director who seems to be known for playing his audience's heartstrings very well takes most of his cues from dark films, where characters die, and where people skirt the edge of reason or even turn completely evil before all is said and done.

But "It's a Wonderful Life" stands out, and I suspect that I know why. It's a completely effective film that somehow avoids falling in to all of the traps of a sentimental family picture. It's sentimental without sentimentality -- without coming across as being made of maple syrup. For Spielberg, who loves to tell uplifting stories (even though, lately, he has taken a dark turn), I can certainly understand why "It's a Wonderful Life" is such an influential film that he will re-watch it before every film he shoots.

An aside: I wonder how "Its a Wonderful Life" will affect me in forty years. Today, I am much more like the young, ambitious George Bailey. I'm not yet a family man, with kids, with that day-to-day grind, and with curbed ambitions. It strikes me as the sort of film that affects people very differently, depending on their age and stage of life.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Princess Bride

2006-01-10T12:05:00.000-05:00

"The Princess Bride" was a film that I was introduced to fairly late, probably by someone who said to me "What? You haven't seen 'The Princess Bride'? Go see it!" I don't remember when the first time I saw it was, but it was on TV last night, and I found myself quite engaged by it, yet again.

What really, truly struck me about it this time around was its sheer technical simplicity -- and the fact that it still "works" despite its technical simplicity.

Here's what I mean.

Andre the Giant plays a giant. the people with the swords are people with swords. The sky is a painted backdrop most of the time (especially at the top of that cliff, early on) but we don't care, because we're too busy laughing at lines like "I am not left handed".

There is plenty in "The Princess Bride" that doesn't look real, and that isn't meant to look real. Rob Reiner is so confident in William Goldman's script that he just lets the sets do what they've done in theater for thousands of years -- imply a location for us so that the story (the STORY!) takes precedence.

I wish today's special effects films would take a note from films like "The Princess Bride". Peter Jackson, for example, spends too much time admiring his own creations in his films (and yes, although I did like the new "King Kong", he's very guilty in that film, as well), and Lucas, unfortunately, since he spent twenty years selling his special effects innovations via ILM, does little more than showcase his technology in his latest "Star Wars" films. Spielberg, along with (possibly) the much younger Shyamalan, seems to know how to weave high-end effects in to an engrossing story (see "Indiana Jones" or "Jaws", or, for a more subtle example, "Minority Report"), but I can't really think of anyone else who does that well. Maybe Joss Whedon? He's too new to tell (and I'm still irked by that line about the "thirty coin" quip that the token Jew in "Serenity" mutters).

-AzS

Musing Pictures: The Abyss

2006-01-05T12:56:00.000-05:00

Whenever I heard mention of James Cameron's "The Abyss", I would get intrigued.

Here is a film about a bunch of reluctant explorers (there's that concept again) underwater, discovering new, weird, crazy things.

I was intrigued both for the mystery of it -- the "what's down there?" aspect -- and for the special effects, which were considered fairly top-of-the-line at the time (and they are).

What disappoints me, now that I've seen it, is that the film is actually a weak, underwater remake of Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (which I feel is one of his most undervalued films). I think its weakness is most pronounced when its heavyhanded anti-violence, anti-war, anti-nuclear rhetoric overtakes the plot. It's an interesting story, but then the story stops so we can witness some demonstrations about how the military is inherently evil (which the film simply assumes). Basically, the military people in this underwater laboratory go insane -- or, at least, one of them does -- and all sorts of bad things happen. I'd be fine with this if it was just another character going nuts. And I'm fine with films that are genuinely critical of the military, or of militant types of authority. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is brilliantly critical by showing that the military, with all of its good intentions, simply doesn't understand what's going on along with everyone else -- and perhaps because it's the military, it can not afford to be as imaginative as regular people. That's a genuine critique, and it is woven very deftly in to Spielberg's narrative. In "The Abyss", Cameron, who can do short sequences really well (the sinking of the Titanic, or the emergence of the Terminator, etc.), can't seem to blend the storytelling with the preachiness, and the effect is that the film pauses every time Cameron thinks he has something important to say.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone remakes "The Abyss" someday. It will be a better film if the military's role is downplayed, and if the awe and wonder of exploration is really given its due.

-AzS

Media Chick: School of Rock

2006-01-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

Here I am again, loyal droves, to give you some more analysis. And if you're new to my writing and you wish there were more of it, go visit my personal Smelblog. It's the same, witty Smeliana with dirtier language and pictures. (No dirty pictures...yet.)

I Always Think There's A Band, Kid

It took me three years to see School of Rock. Why? Why would I wait so long for unbridled hilarity? Because I'm a snob. A stupid snob who likes to feel like her films are commenting on society and history and theory. And if they're not depressing treatises, I like them to be cheeky satires or meta-rants. So I avoided School of Rock because I thought it wouldn't thrill me. And then I would have to explain to the plebian masses why I wasn't rolling in the aisles whenever Mr. Black raised his eyebrows. And that, my gentle readers, would be too much with which to deal.

So I've waited until today to watch my roommate's copy. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Why didn't any of you tell me that School of Rock was a modern-day Music Man???

I'm a little disappointed in you all. I would have watched it much sooner had I known. We have the idealistic dreamer who comes across as a slackerly, commitment-phobic huckster in our hero. We have the begging-to-be-unwound teacher/principal/librarian/pseudo-love interest. (She even gets propositioned by a more successful version of the hero during the film's climax.) We have the old friend who abadoned the dream to come work in the situation in which Mr. Music finds himself. Friendo here has got a girl whereas Mr. Music is loveless, albeit searching. He wins over the kids, sometimes as a group and sometimes confronting individuals' needs, giving them special parts when requested. And, when the moment that the kids have been working for suddenly arrives, he has been intimidated by the parents, run out of town, only to be ushered back by his believing flock, pleading for his leadership and turning his lessons of confidence and joy back onto himself in the nick of time. Huzzah!

I know the love story elements aren't as strong. There aren't any bandleader/baton girl romances. And the kids aren't exactly the same. But there is a fat Black girl with an Arethavoice, a scared Asian boy with a penchant for Classical piano and books, and a skinny whitewashed Jewboy who is the brains behind the music. That totally modernizes the fatherless Irish boy with a lisp. If only the grade-grubbing Hapa girl had been sisters with the uptight principal...

(The ever-talented Joan Cusack looks significantly less ugly here than she usually does. I think she's the ugliest successful actress in Hollywood. Except maybe Uma Thurman, but she has her good days, at least.)

Anyway, what more is there to say about School of Rock that can't be concluded by my racial stereotyping? I would comment on the actual rock elements of the film, but as I would say, I don't know from Rock. But the movie was really fun and peppy. I bet it's a great babysitting flick. And then you can do air guitar with your kids. That'd be good.

Also, what about the bassist chick? She's totally ignored in the plot. I know you can't have a plot around every kid, but, come on! She's a female, 10 year-old bassist! You gotta give her some attention or no one ever will!

And don't even get me started on the gaygaygay little boy fashion designer. The only way they could have exagerrated that further would have been to have him hit on one of the other rockers. "I love your leather pants. They fit so...well. They'd look great on my floor in the morning..." (Overeducated, gay 10 year-olds speak with many ellipses. It's a mix between closeted fear and fabulous confidence.)

So that's my take on School of Rock. Sorry, Dr. Stoner, that I didn't write about How Stella Got Her Groove Back yet. I don't know if I should tackle the racial angle (He's always blacklit and she always spotlit, making him appear even darker and she lighter, a dynamic that fits right in with their power struggle.) and/or the gender angle (Is this an objectifying of the man a reclaiming of female sexuality, another tickmark in the history of objectifying Black men, or a dual-objectification of both of them, because they're both just so damn gorgeous?). And all of the bell hooks texts in my brain are screaming at me. "How dare you purport to suggest that one could ever separate the racial and gender angles! And what about the class issues?! That boy went from wealthy in Jamaica to working-class among the vacationing wealthy to rich in San Francisco! Where is the nuance in those societies? And what about addressing the poor Blacks in the areas?! No successful Black woman should live without acknowledging her less fortunate sisters in the ghetto! Where is this movie's class/racial/gender consciousness? It's in the dumpster, chucked to make room for a couple of steamy sex scenes! Well, I never!" You see, bell hooks is a very angry woman. But Lord does she have a right to be...

Anyway, next time I tell you my brain is overflowing after a movie, it's with rants like that. Just so you know.

So, whaddya think?

Musing Pictures: Aguirre -- Wrath of God

2006-01-03T12:11:00.000-05:00

Depressing films are not new, but they do bring to mind an interesting question, which I will get to later.

I recently had an opportunity to see the 1972 German film, "Aguirre -- Wrath of God", which had been sitting, un-watched, on my shelf for several months. My first introduction to the film was by name, only, on a movie list from a 10th grade film teacher (Media Chick remembers him, too). Fast forward to my sophomore year of college, the intro film history class, and there it is again, Aguirre, in a dramatic final scene, standing aslant on a rickety raft, sailing down a tropical river with monkeys and corpses for company. The professor showed only that one scene, and it was all I knew of "Aguirre -- Wrath of God" for several years.

When I finally popped it in the VCR (yes, VHS tapes are really cheap, so I still buy them) all I knew to expect was that Aguirre would stand alone, with monkeys, in the end.

It's a very strange film, and of course, a very dark one. Aguirre, the head of a mutinous band of explorers, pushes them beyond their abilities and beyond their sanity in a quest to find the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. It is a study in leadership, and in insanity, and in the relationship between the two.

When I think of tales of exploration, the ones I gravitate towards are triumphant -- Neil Armstrong, Vespucci, Magellan, and yes, even Columbus, before the butchery. In my capacities as a dreamer and a storyteller, there is little more fascinating than the promise of just beyond the dip of the horizon. In "Aguirre", Werner Herzog paints a dark promise: there is nothing over the horizon but more horizon. We know that El Dorado is a myth, and that knowledge forces us to not only frown on the stalwart explorers, but to feel anger, as well, at Aguirre himself (played brilliantly by Klaus Kinski), for driving them so hard towards something that Just Isn't There. I think that's the difference between "Aguirre" and other exploration stories -- we know the ending, and we know it can't be good. When we first saw "The Wizard of Oz", we didn't know the ending, but it was good. The end of the rainbow proved to be a warm, happy, safe place. Although Magellan died before his circumnavigation of the globe was complete, we know that the task he set out to achieve was completed successfully, and GPS systems everywhere are now named after him. At the Olympic Games, we watch eagerly to see someone rise to victory. But there is also that dark fascination with watching another's failure. That is the fascination that makes "Aguirre" so powerful.

It's dark, and it's depressing, and we sometimes wonder, "who wants to see a dark, depressing movie?" I admit, I don't like them, most of the time. I love the cinema that transports and uplifts me -- the grand, sweeping, operatic stuff that leaves me desperately happy. But there's a fascination, nonetheless, with a fall. King Kong (the remake) is all about that -- a three hour film that culminates, literally, in a character's fall. Although I enjoyed the remake of Kong, a student of mine made the astute observation that it's just not fun to have so much pity for a character that you can't do anything to help.

There's a theory, and I don't think it has a name, that says: a strong source of tension in film comes from the desire to help a character, conflicting with the realization that you can not reach through the screen to the world of the film -- the desire and the inability to help.

Hitchcock takes full advantage of this type of tension, showing us just a little more than a character knows, and teasing us by placing the character in just the situation that makes the knowledge we have most relevant and most urgent. The key to Hitchcock, though, is that the character we care about gets out of the situation somehow. Our tension is released through relief. In "King Kong", and in "Aguirre", our tension is released through dispair and disappointment, if it is released at all. Rather than laughing, we cry, or brood. Sometimes, it just turns in to frustration. And it is not the same as crying when a beloved character dies "naturally" -- when even had we been able to provide information through the screen to the film, the character would have died. That is a death we can feel genuinely sad about, because there is no guilt associated with it. The character died, and it's sad for everyone who is still alive, but we don't have the frustration associated with the unrelieved tension.

"Munich", also a depressing film, works because even if we think we have the answers, we know that even within the film's world (which is meant to mirror our own), there are no clear answers. Even if we could reach in and say something, it wouldn't have an effect. (and yes, Spielberg does have his Hitchcock moment, when the little girl comes home early, and the bomb meant for her father threatens to take her life instead... but that moment, true to Hitchcock, allows for the right kind of release -- relief, rather than frustration.)

In "Aguirre", as in "King Kong", we have a feeling that we could step in and explain things. We could tell the world, "King Kong is just a Big Monkey with a Heart of Gold and a Penchant for Blondes!" or "Come on, guys, can't you tell Aguirre is insane? Feed him to the monkeys, and let's get out of here!" And we know we're right, and the screen prevents us from being able to say anything, and it's frustrating.

Werner Herzog's recent "Grizzly Man" is on my list of films to see. From the sound of it, it's also depressing in the same way (it's the tale of a man who devoted his life to protecting Grizzly Bears, only to get eaten by them one day.) I'm sure I'll have the same reaction to it, wanting desperately to tell this guy to get out of the woods, but not being able to because of the glass or the canvas that divides reality from the world of the film. [and a twist on "Grizzly Man" is that it is a documentary... time itself becomes a barrier, too.]

Media Chick: Match Point

2006-01-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen wishes you would just admit to your despair. He used to be some adorable little man who spent his days worrying about his inadequacies. You thought that was so cute. "Ooooh. Look at him ponder and pace and pout! Isn't he darling! The jittery little Jewish man is so insecure!" But, gentle readers, you were wrong. Woody is 70 now and the nervousness has given way to an air of wisdom about the world. And, turns out, the world sucks. Or, as he put it in three quotations I found, "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." And, "Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all."

Sounds hopeful, right?

Wrong.

"Match Point" is about the supremacy of luck. (Luck is the absence of reason or a cause-and-effect system of occurences.) One character states early on, "I think faith is the path of least resistance." And this ideology carries throughout the film. I'm not sure if Allen thinks that everything is a waste of time (maybe not sex...) but hope sure is. And even hedging ones bets seems to be fairly futile. Along with Allen decrying faith, he heralds the failure of Intelligent Design. (While the Godlessness of the world is merely a corrolary to "Match Point"'s metaphysics, this is the same Allen who said, "I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.") Anything that is under our control is just as quickly out of control. Forces of nature, logic, reason, or history can change without a moment's notice and we're left to cope with the pieces. Or we're not left at all.

Don't get me wrong. "Match Point" was a fantastic film. Unlike most depressing works I've seen, it had a cogent outlook on the world, presented clearly, convincingly, and completely. The entire film fit under this rubric, cleverly laying piece after piece down, until its events seemed to point to the only logical construction of the universe. Allen seems to have it all worked out. I just hope he's wrong.

I could talk about the fabulous casting, the hottttt sex scenes (more like sex snippets), or the excellent discussion about class. I could talk to you all about how Allen's New Yorker frankness served as a perfect implied counterpoint to this film about highly British manners. But, really, I'm too depressed.

Upside? Filmmaking is alive and well. Downside? It's alive in a man who once said, "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else."

Isn't that special?

Media Chick

2006-01-02T10:54:00.000-05:00

Hello everybody! It is I, AzS's new partner in legality, Media Chick aka Smeliana. I have been one of AzS's foils in celluloid ever since our high school days in good ol' Waltham, MA. He and I used to sit on a bus traveling around Israel, talking all about movies we loved and recommending whole lists to each other. Maybe, just maybe, next time I go home to Beantown I'll bring that journal back and document those lists. How have our lists changed, five years later?

Anyway, AzS and I have always been a great tag team because our interests are along different angles of the vast cinematic universe. AzS, as far as I can tell, is a lover of film as an art form and a communicative medium for filmmakers to speak to audiences. I, on the other hand, am a bit of a media slut. I love the blunt instrument of the widescreen, the sledgehammer of popular opinion that is generated through ad campaigns, and the capitalist wars that are waged through studio competition. It's all so crude and animalistic. And yet, every so often, some people know how to wield these impossible tools to create multi-fronted attacks on the populace that grab their attentions such that forking down $10.75 seems a natural instinct.

Okay, that's ideology, albeit in a caricaturized nutshell.

Biography? I went to high school with AzS. I then fled Boston with the speed of an overhyped, newly shorn centerfielder and came to The City (New York, that is) to go to college at Columbia. I majored in American Studies, focusing in sociology and movies. I wrote my thesis on the evolution of the portrayal of gay men with AIDS in film. (Yes. I saw "Philadelphia".) And now I'm living in this big City, with all its bright lights, and trying to break into journalism. Turns out "freelancer" applies mostly to the amount of money I'll be working for and the pain that the search inflicts. It's not an easy business. But I've tried other things and this writing thing is what I love. I guess that's when you go into it. So this blog, as well as my personal blog get me writing and even get other people reading me. What could be better?

So check back, often, to see my thoughts on the films I see. I'm going to be the one to address the celebrity-driven backstories, media campaigns, implications and expectations of the films in addition to their actual stories/artistry. It's all very meta. But don't worry. You'll be able to keep up.

And I'm the one who uses the dirty words. You'll want to keep reading.

Feel free to comment. I'd love to hear what you think!

Musing Pictures: What this Blog is All About

2005-12-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

This blog is not about film reviews. Everyone writes film reviews. In these posts, I will not rate a movie with stars, or thubs, or tomatoes. I will avoid telling you what you should or shouldn't see.

This is a blog for thoughts and discussions about movies -- both current and old. This is a blog for film lovers everywhere to unite in conversation, discussion, and reflection on the art, science, culture and entertainment of moving pictures.

These posts began on livejournal, where they were buried between various other unrelated entries. It's about time "Musing Pictures" was its own blog.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Munich

2005-12-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

I am very surprised at some of the negative press this film received before its release.

I had an opportunity to see "Munich" on Friday, catching a mid-day matinee on the first day of its release.

It is a very delicate film, despite the strength with which it comes across -- and it is one of the darkest, most subdued of Spielberg's films.

It begins with the Munich Olympics massacre, in a sequence that combines re-enactment and a combination of authentic news footage. The combination allows us to feel the horror of the event while feeling the truthfulness of it -- regardless of whether everything else in the film happened the way it did, the massacre at Munich is real, is caught-on-film, and as such, that gives the re-enactment a great deal of weight and significance.

Spielberg has made films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and African Slavery. For the first time, he has made a film about an event which he can remember, himself. I imagine that Spielberg's memories of Munich are from the news media -- and he gives us, especially those of us too young to remember, not just the opportunity to see the news reports he saw, but, through the dramatization, he grands us the opportunity to experience it all with an immediacy that a history lesson can never convey.

And that sets the tone for the film that follows -- a film that is a dramatization, inspired by true events, but never claiming to be a full representation of them. In its deviance from pure fact, "Munich" manages to tell a story of meta-truth, capturing the great complexities of this chapter in Israel's history in one story. Thankfully, Spielberg does not try to dillute those complexities. In bringing them all down to just a few characters in one relatively limited series of events, Spielberg manages to concentrate those complexities, to bring them all in to full-view all at once.

The power of "Munich" is that it manages to express the deep trauma of Israel in a universal way -- and I say "of Israel" because both Spielberg and the film's primary writer Tony Kushner, care deeply about Israel. As complex as the film is, its views on Palestinians are exclusively views from-the-outside. This is a personal film, and as such, any attempt at a more personal view of Palestinians would have detracted from the film's honesty. Palestinians have a voice, and a very interesting one, but it is not a voice that is different from the voice of Palestinian Public Relations offices all over the world -- and it is combined with the voice we hear of terrorists and the folks who encourage and support them (in case you worried that Palestinians come off as peaceniks -- they don't.)

"Munich" is a Jewish film, about a Jewish state that struggles desperately with the double-need to both exist and to do the right thing in the face of not an in-human enemy, but an enemy with a face, with a name, and with its own claims. Too often, on the news, we hear about Israel killing X number of people. It's too rare that we see the agony people face, on their own and among their friends, when trying to decide whether to pull the trigger, or detonate the explosive.

I am relieved about one thing: In his effort to try to convey the complexity of the conflict, Spielberg could have run in to the trap of making stuff up -- and I don't mean in terms of the basic narrative.

Spielberg shows the Israelis struggling with killing people who are VERY guilty of severe crimes. He shows them going to extreme lengths, jeopardizing their own mission, to avoid killing civillians and bystandards (even when they use bombs (!!!)) This has been a public conversation in Israel for thirty years, so it's not made up.

To balance this off, Spielberg could have portrayed the Palestinians as somehow similarly humane... but since Munich, the approach of Palestinian millitants has been purely terroristic -- that is, not only have they not made efforts to avoid killing civillians, but they have actively pursued policies of killing civillians at random and without mercy. Spielberg does not try to portray Palestinian terrorism in a "better light". On the contrary, he keeps bringing images of the Munich massacre back, to remind us, over and over again, just how horriffic that type of violence is, and just how important it is to respond very strongly to it. Spielberg eventually questions the particular response, but not the need to respond harshly.

Were the film to suggest a conclusion to the whole mess, it would be a weak film. It is a film about the confusion of the situation, and about the difficulty of actually, truly rising above it.

If you have a strong opinion against the film, I urge you to take a look at Spielberg's own defense of the work -- a defense I feel he shouldn't have been put in the position of having to make. His comments are here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051225/PEOPLE/512250311 and here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051225/PEOPLE/512250312

-AzS

Musing Pictures: King Kong (2005)

2005-12-14T11:50:00.000-05:00

Ok, Ok, Peter Jackson can finally count me as a fan.

There are potential spoilers below, but come on, you KNOW what happens!

As you may recall, I was half-hearted in my appreciation of each of his "Lord of the Rings" films, especially the first one. This had mostly to do with certain techniques that Jackson employs (slow motion, "flickering" images (it has to do with doubling certain frames and eliminating other frames in a regular pattern if you want to get technical about it), and an uncomfortably close dance along the edge of the "too much happening on the screen" line (which is one that Lucas, for example, crosses religiously in the recent "Star Wars" additions.))

Jackson used the same techniques here, in his carefully wrought re-make of the 1933 Cooper and Schoedsack classic, "King Kong", but the film tells a much smaller story than the one he had to tackle with his "Rings" films, and that makes a huge difference.

What made the original '33 "King Kong" such a lasting success wasn't the special effects, and it certainly wasn't the camerawork (which tends to be very static and plain). What gave the original film the right to call itself a classic was the efficiency and effectiveness of the story.

"King Kong" is not only a near-perfect three-act narrative (Going to/confronting Skull Island, Adventures on the Island, Adventures in New York), but it also incorporates very strongly those necessary points along its narrative arc that give it direction -- The incident that incites the action is straightforward and believable, the parallel narratives of Darrow/Kong and Everyone Else/Island Creatures are crisply interwoven, and the twist at the end of the second act that slingshots us in to the third act is absolutely perfect.

It is with this moment that I would like to begin my musings.

The third act of a (good) film is not merely resolution. It is often an escalation that follows what looks like it should be a resolution -- and it's an escalation that leads to a new, often more extreme result.

If King Kong had been a bad film, it would have gone like this:

Carl Denham goes to Skull Island to get footage for his film. Ann Darrow gets kidnapped by the Ape. Rescue party formed. Adventures in Jungle. Ann is rescued. Everyone goes home.

Clearly, this would be a fairly mundane, uninteresting story. The brilliance of King Kong is that in order to make this an excellent story, NOTHING IS CHANGED, but something is added. It's the 2nd act twist:

Denham's intentions (but not his motivations) change. He thought he would make a movie, but oh no, now he can do something better: He can capture Kong and bring him back alive.

This twist launches us beautifully in to the third act, which shows the bitter consequences of Denham's ambition, with Kong famously ripping up New York.

I was pleased to see that Jackson knew where the Kong story's effectiveness lay. When the Ape is finally put to sleep at the end of the 2nd act, Denham remarks that in a few months, Broadway will be lit up by the words "Kong: The Eighth Wonder of the World". Fade to black, and up comes the third act, with the Broadway sign, and patrons clamoring at the theater entrance for a ticket. It is line-for-line, shot-for-shot the transition that Cooper and Schoedsack employ in the original film. Jackson made no attempt to bring us back on to the ship, to show Kong being transported, to show Darrow telling her story, or any of that stuff that we are left to imagine in the original film. He knew, without a doubt, that the strength of "King Kong" lies deep within that transition, that elision of time which allows us to complete our film's journey.

Jackson knew some other things, too.

He did not only borrow moments, shots, lines and transitions from the original film, but he made sure to incorporate some of the music, as well.

Few people realize that "King Kong", in 1933, was the first film to have an underscore -- music that plays along underneath certain scenes. The music, by Max Steiner (famous for his scores to "Gone with the Wind" and "Casablanca") makes an appearance (very appropriately) during the New York "premiere" of King Kong -- it is played by the theater's pit orchestra.

And that leads me to something fascinating about both the 1933 and the 2005 versions of the film.

They both seem to be simultaneously praising and putting down their own medium.

"King Kong" is a film. In it, there is a character who sets out to shoot a film. That film which he shoots includes King Kong. He decides, though, that oh no, film is grand and all, but you know what would be better? THE REAL THING. In this way, he becomes a theater producer in an instant. So, theater is all well-and-good, but do you know what happens next? In theater, the Monster doesn't stay stuck in two dimensions, on a canvas screen. In theater, the monster CAN EAT YOU. And it does. And aren't we all just so reassured that we're not watching a play right now?

This is a subtlety of the 1933 version of the film which Peter Jackson openly challenges.

Ann Darrow wants to be an actress in the theater. Denham's film canisters break open, leaving him with no useable footage (which gives him a stronger motive to decide to bring Kong back). Jackson introduces a new character to the story -- a playwright named Jack Driscoll (played by Adrien Brody) who is recruited to write Denham's film. Driscoll doesn't seem to like movies much, and says so on at least one occasion.

Most interestingly, Jackson adds a scene in which Darrow, at a loss for what to do as Kong's latest captive, begins to pull tricks out of her vaudeville routine, slowly discovering that Kong finds her amusing -- it is their first real interaction, and as such, it is a testament to the power of the theater -- or, at least, to the interpersonal, direct nature of the theater.

I don't have anything against the theater, but I'm not so sure I like the way Jackson balances things out here. It's a (very slight) deviation from the simplicity of the original story, and although it's interesting to think about in its own right, I wonder if it really works for the film.

But these are all details! Details!

For those of you who want to know if I liked the film -- I did. Quite a bit, in fact. It was a thoughtful adventure, much slower than modern adventures (but modern adventures are impatient and deceptive -- this is not a modern adventure). And it was very genuine.

One more digression: Communication.

It is amazing how many movies there are about communication and miscommunication.

It seems as though every major cinematic conflict could be resolved if people knew how to talk to one another. If Kong could talk... or if Vader and Luke had only spent some time around a coffee table... There's a lot of anxiety when people talk to each other but don't understand each other... especially when we seem to understand both of them. I think that's where a lot of the suspense in "King Kong" comes from -- that and the fact that we KNOW what will happen next (and as such, we know we can't avoid it).

It's interesting how much more conscious we can be of Destiny when we're watching remakes...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Syriana

2005-12-12T11:51:00.000-05:00

Who is Stephen Gaghan?

At the end of "Syriana", credit is given to Gaghan for both writing and directing the film.

Looking him up, I was not so surprised to see that one of his (relatively few) other credits was for writing the screenplay to Soderbergh's "Traffic".

"Syriana" is like "Traffic" but with Oil Money replacing Drug Money as the root of corruption in a web of even more corruption that reaches the highest levels of governments that are already (you guessed it!) corrupt.

I remember "Traffic" being refreshing -- it was a web, and a complicated, disjointed one, but it was also cohesive in its clear condemnation not only of drugs, but of the terrible blood-economy of their trade.

Although "Syriana" is somewhat of a repetition of "Traffic" (that is, although it is by now approaching formulaic), it is still a fascinating film to watch.

Unlike "Traffic", the elements of the story all interrelate much more directly -- but the clarity that "Traffic" had is missing from this film.

"Traffic" did not offer any solutions to the problems of the drug trade, but somehow, in a film about the evils of the people who bargain for national oil supplies, it's hard to say that folks who drive cars, or folks who heat their homes in winter are doing something wrong -- heck, it's hard to say that folks who negotiate shady business deals in order to offer cheaper, competitive oil prices are doing something wrong (especially when we're all still paying around $2 for a gallon of gas here, compared to what we paid a year ago). Unlike "Traffic", which is a film about selfishness on a grand scale, "Syriana" seems to be an even darker film, about selflessness failing.

The CIA agent who devotes his life to his work seems to inadvertently cause the very act he hopes to prevent. The oil barons who want to make sure that their customers are buying cheap gas, that their investors are earning dividends, and that the Chinese economy doesn't out-pace their own, end up de-stabilizing the oil market and instigating their own downfall. The lawyers who want to make sure things are done according to Law discover that the Law would throw the lives of everyone around them in to chaos, if it were only adhered to. The Prince who Would Rather Be King has strong, progressive ideas, but they get him killed, rather than getting him in to power. And even the Iranian kid, who wants to find work to bring his mother out of Iran ends up a suicide bomber -- a terrorist.

"Syriana" is a depressing film, but a fascinating one -- all of these characters, with their very different stories and very different backgrounds become involved one way or another with the Big Picture. And isn't that what movies seem to be about? The Big Picture?

I've seen some wonderful intimate portraits on the screen -- films about a particular person, etc. -- but it's always about taking that person and making him or her larger-than-life. Gaghan, it seems, does the reverse. He takes The Big Picture, and somehow manages to make it fit on The Big Screen (which, of course, is much smaller than The Big Picture ever was). In that way, though, this becomes a film about ideas, and not about characters. I don't remember their names, but I remember what they stood for -- and every character in the film stands for something. That's the greatest tradgedy of it. No one is right.

I read somewhere that this is a film that doesn't aim at a conclusion. It doesn't try to solve the world's problems. I'm glad that I read that before I saw the film -- otherwise I might have expected something that wasn't ever going to be there.

I'm glad that the next movie I'm seeing is going to be light. Even though it's star probably weighs quite a few tons... "King Kong" (the 1933 version) is the next film I'll be teaching, and I'm showing it tomorrow, less than twelve hours before Peter Jackson's version goes in to wide release...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

2005-12-04T11:52:00.000-05:00

Although I saw this film in its opening weekend, it has taken me a while to figure out what I want to write about it.

The "Harry Potter" films, so far, have served me well as examples of what to do and what not to do when adapting from a book.

The first two films of the series, in sticking so closely to the structure of Rowling's story, were long, drawn-out, and ultimately, quite slow. They were certainly enormous fun to look at (I remember being particularly tickled by the moving staircases and the animate paintings), but even the special effects did not quite lift those films beyond being simiply allright (which, considering the strengths of the books off of which they were based, is far worse than those films should have been).

Those first two films, directed by Chris Columbus, whose 1990s successes, including "Home Alone" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" are noteworthy achievements, did do one thing quite well: They prepared the stage marvellously for the two films that followed.

Alfonso Cuaron, who boldly deviated from Rowling's written word, could not have gotten away with such machinations of plot had Columbus not satisfied the world's fans first by sticking so closely to the narrative. Once fans saw what a close adaptation would be, they were more willing to accept the work of a director like Cuaron (who is certainly not "standard fare" when it comes to family entertainment).

And that brings us to Harry Potter IV, directed by Mike Newell, yet another unexpected helmer, who is known for films like "Donnie Brasco" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral". Here, it is clear, he had flexibility. The success, both popular and academic, of Harry Potter III gave Newell a great deal of leeway in terms of his adaptation of the book to the screen.

Frankly, I do not remember the book enough to know the differences, but I am sure that there are many. Part of my certainty lies in the pacing of the film itself.

A book is generally paced in small segments -- usually chapters -- each of which has its own mini-climax, and its own mini-resolution (which is often no resolution at all other than a convenient place to stop reading for the night). The first two Harry Potter films maintained a great deal of this pacing as a side-effect to staying so true to the books' narrative flow. Movies, though, aren't things that we see in short bits, the way we tend to read books. On the contrary, it is fairly rare that we don't see a movie straight through (and when we see a movie on TV, the commercials really do feel like interruptions, rather than coherent breaks).

What Cuaron did with the third Harry Potter film, and what Newell was wise to continue doing with the fourth, involved a re-working of the plot to eliminate the heavy down-beat of a chapter's end. Rather than telling the story in mini-chapters, each fragment of the tale wove cleanly in to the next, so the film's momentum never fell.

And who is David Yates?

The director of the next Harry Potter film, due in theaters in 2007, seems to have done a handful of TV movies and miniseries, including one called "Sex Traffic", of all things... and a few theatrical short-films... and just about nothing else. Now, I'm Really curious...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Good Night and Good Luck

2005-11-08T11:53:00.000-05:00

Early in the film "Good Night and Good Luck", I was struck by a line of Edward R. Murrow's. It was something like "there aren't always two equally valid sides to every story", and it set the tone for the questions of journalistic responsibility that the film, and the history it depicted, expressed.

Over the past four years or so, I have developed an interest in what it means for something to be "pure news". Much of this began with a recognition of strong anti-Israel biases in the media when things got excessively violent there around early 2002, and continued to develop as I began to watch Fox News, taking note of a different flavor to their reporting, which they label "fair and balanced".

"Good Night and Good Luck" really satisfied me, in that it was impartial without being wimpy. Was Murrow right to use his position as a "newsman" (he calls himself that, and indeed, he absolutely was one) to actively attack a politician and his actions? Or, as Murrow himself claimed, is it authentically non-biased "news" to report when a person does wrong? Or, as others point out in the film and beyond it, is the press overstepping its boundaries when it puts people on "trial"? Is pure impartiality dishonest reporting?

This last question strikes me as particularly interesting, because there is such a strong sense these days that an ideal news broadcast is a purely impartial -- that is, a noncommittal -- statement on stuff that has happened. This became particularly tricky whith reports on the Middle East in early 2002, when some press, in an effort to be "impartial", referred to murderers as "freedom fighters" on a regular basis, even though I'm sure the journalists themselves would have condemned murder-by-bus-bomb fervently. It all goes back to that early question in the film -- when the two sides of a story aren't equally valid, at what point can a reporter, or a news organization, depict one side as being "right" and the other side as being "wrong"?

I couldn't help thinking to myself, while watching the film, that Murrow's character reminded me a lot of Bill O'Reilley, of Fox News. I would be deeply shocked if O'Reilley didn't study Murrow's philosophies and techniques at some point in his early career. They both strike me as the sort of deeply patriotic men who editorialize out of obligation to the ideals they see their nation standing for.

And for a black and white film to gross more than its budget in wide release in only about five weeks is a good sign for filmmakers, too. It means some people are still willing to take serious film seriously -- even if it's not in color.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: MirrorMask

2005-10-23T10:54:00.000-05:00

I saw MirrorMask in the middle of last week with my close friend and collaborator, Josh. In our conversation about the film on the way back from the theater, Josh said something that struck me as particularly apt and true. I paraphrase: "It was an art film that had no bones about being an art film -- it set out to achieve something, and it achieved it".

MirrorMask, the tale of a young girl who encounters a strange, dream-like adventure when her mother falls ill, has been compared to other young-girl-on-a-dream-mission stories like "The Wizard of Oz". Unlike that 1939 film, MirrorMask does not play to the typical mainstream. It takes the age-old motto, "there's no place like home", and begins pondering whose home that refers to -- is it my home? your home? Is one home better than another?

But the art and artistry of MirrorMask is in its visual tapestry, which is mostly righ out of the crazy mind of graphic artist and co-creator, Dave McKean.

An aside on digital effects: There is a huge quest underway in the filmmaking world to create digital effects that are more realistic than anything that came before them. In an article I read recently, the folks who created that fabulous character, Gollum, in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trillogy, talk all about one-upping themselves with his upcoming "King Kong" remake. It's all about crisp clarity, about "every hair on Kong's back", about every eyelash being absolutely lucid.

And there is why so much of MirrorMask struck me as so fascinating. MirrorMask's images are not crisp. There are layers, hints, as if each frame is its own graphic design. The actors interact in a CGI landscape that includes hand drawings and various other forms of animation interweaving and overlapping. It is a film that attempts to make graphic art move.

If you go to see this film expecting a straightforward, easy-to-follow story, you'll get more out of it by closing your eyes -- the visuals, which we usually rely on to understand the films we see, are so far from what we are used to that they can become very hard to follow. The narrative itself is fairly straightforward, but to really appreciate the film, I think you have to accept that the narrative isn't so significant. The point of this film is hidden somewhere among the drawings, paintings, renderings and animations that dance on the screen.

But this is why, when it comes down to it, I don't feel that MirrorMask is a fully successful film. There is a lot to be said for art films, but for an art film to be a narrative art film (as opposed to a purely experimental art film), it needs to work with its audience in mind. Films like "Memento" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", both of which I see as intentional works of art, were both made with a clear eye to the mainstream audience. experimental art films like Andy Warhol's "Sleep" (it's about eight hours long. Go guess what it's about.) are clearly meant to be concept-pieces (And I think even Warhol would have been really creeped out if there were millions of people flocking to theaters to see this film...) MirrorMask falls in between, somehow. It tells a mainstream story, but uses a technique that is not refined for storytelling in this way. Although I enjoyed the film a good bit, I would have had a much easier time recommending it if it were more 'crisply' visual -- if the images were clearer than they are.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

2005-10-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

I think I enjoy the Wallace and Gromit claymation films because their humor is so easy to enjoy -- it tends to be clean-ish, with an occasional hint at something sardonic and different... perhaps it's the British origins to this particular humor which make it so appealing to me? But what I really, truly appreciate about Wallace and Gromit in this age of cheaply-produced "reality TV" is the clearly excruciating level of absolute detail that these films exhibit. I just got back from "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit", their first feature (Wallace and Gromit's first feature, that is -- Nick Park already has the likes of "Chicken Run" on his resume).

Again, the humor fit me very well -- it was generally fairly clean, always sharp, and always funny in a good-natured sort of way, a way that made me enjoy laughing. And again, the details struck me as ridiculously impressive.

In a documentary on Film Noir which I show to my students every year, one of the talking heads (whose name, admittedly, I ought to remember) says something about film which strikes me as both true and forgotten: If you are making a movie, you have to be in total control of everything which appears on screen, because if you're not controling it, you're not making a movie -- you're just taking pictures.

My first reaction to this line when I heard it was that of course it couldn't be absolutely true -- when I shoot my films, I can't afford to construct a set, so I use real places, real locations, and as such, necessarily, my choice of location is in leu of my ability to fully control an environment -- I pick a location, rather than creating one, and that's about as close as I can get to full control.

But that's just it -- it's still a manipulation of the narrative, or, rather, a manipulation (by eliminating all other possible locations) of the place in which the narrative unfolds, and in that sense, it's still more control than simply 'taking pictures'.

But then there are reality TV shows, where there's really very little directorial intent behind the actions of characters or their background. And films have been edging towards this trend as well ("The Blair Witch Project" was a fluke in its day, but there's a tendency now to shoot from the hip in movies -- especially in independent films, shot on video, because tape is cheap, and it's all about 'accidentally' getting the right shot... it's like entering a marksmanship competition with a howitzer, or an M-16: the target will get hit by something, but it doesn't really matter how much else will get hit as well.)

With claymation, though (and, in some ways, with most types of animation), there is an absolute necessity to pay full attention to the details, because they can not be accidental. Animations from the age of classical hollywood (think: "Snow White") tended to showcase a few details, and to use the background the way live-action films would use a painted backdrop. A bird flying through a tree, for example, was intentionally placed there, and as such, would not be "background" in the way that the forest is a background, 'behind' it...

In fact, the way the early Disney features were shot would allow to get rid of the quotes around the word 'behind' -- the camera would be set up on a device that would show several "layers" of the image, with foreground objects closest to the camera, and the backdrop farthest from it. The camera would shoot 'through' all of these layers, compressing them visually in to the one image which we'd see on the screen.

The difference with claymation is that although there is a "set" in which the action takes place, that "set" has to be constructed with the care and detail of everything that appears before it -- there is no "background" in claymation, the way one would see it in a classical Disney animation. Since claymation is authentically three-dimensional when it is shot, the sense of depth in the image is much clearer than it is in classical animation, which takes on a two-dimensional, image-within-a-frame look. A city street in claymation is a model of a city street, not a painting of one, and whereas paintings do not require detail, models, somehow, demand it.

I don't think I'd appreciate Wallace and Gromit nearly as much if the settings of their films were dulled -- if walls were just flat expanses of clay, and if books were nothing more than rectangular clay blocks.

The great thing about the detail in these films, though, is that none of it is there just to 'look pretty'. Something I recommend to anyone who sees a Wallace and Gromit film is READ EVERYTHING! Every word placed in to the background is placed with such intention and care that the background of the film is its own entertaining device, where all sorts of humor lurks, awaiting discovery. Somehow all of this is placed in to the background of the film with such skill and with such care that it does not detract from the narrative itself, nor does it attempt to upstage the narrative like a bluebird flapping its way through an early Disney feature, stepping in to the foreground for its moment in front of the lens. No, the background here stays background, and beckons the viewer to really dive in to the film's surface, among its textures, to really experience the full richness of the humor involved.

Perhaps my favorite example of this, not from this most recent film of theirs, but from an earlier Wallace and Gromit claymation (perhaps "The Wrong Trousers?" but I don't remember):

Poor Gromit the dog has been placed in prison. We get a shot of him laying on his prison bunk morosely reading a book. To see a dog in prison, reading a book, is kind of funny in itself, but if you really look closely (at a detail that is not meant to stand out), the book he is reading is (none other than) "Crime and Punishment"! And if you read the smaller print (if you go through all that effort, you're already inside the frame itself, inside that prison cell, because you can't read the small print otherwise), you see it's by none other than that great canine, "Fido Dogstoyevsky"

It's not a bluebird flapping its wings for the audience -- it's a little, tiny detail underneath another little tiny detail in a small part of a small shot in a small scene in a short film. It could have just been any old book, and no one would have noticed, but someone on that animating team went through the trouble to create those letters on the cover of that book, and that's where making movies really happens.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Serenity

2005-10-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

Although I never had a chance to pay the short-lived TV show, "Firefly" any attention, I decided last night to give the film that is based on it a try.

"Serenity" struck me as being very refreshingly "retro" -- this, of course, is an observation that fans of the show have already made a long time ago. But my interest in "Serenity" really had nothing to do with the show -- I wanted to see if it would hold up on its own, As A Film.

Part of the reason I wanted to see if it would hold as a film on its own was that from the beginning, it ran the risk that many "Star Trek" films have faced: It risked looking and feeling like nothing more than simply a longer, bigger-budget TV show episode on a really big screen. There were times when I felt that it did just that -- in the way that the camera moved through the CGI space, shifting and zipping this way and that... it was a way of moving that is native to the small screen, but which, to my surprise, fit the bigger screen rather well.

the type of acting that the lead characters displayed was also very small-screen-ish, almost painfully begging to be televised, at times (and in fact, a significant portion of the film involves the characters desperately trying to make an interstellar TV broadcast, despite the interferance of an evil "alliance"... does it sound like the filmmaker had a beef with the networks or what? They did cancel his show, after all...) But the acting, probably because it is smaller, meeker, less grandiose, actually makes the characters all the more believable -- rather than overplaying their characters, the actors somehow managed to underplay them, and in that way, to bring them to life in ways that "movie stars" generally have a hard time doing.

So, good ol' Joss Whedon made a movie about broadcasting a secret message (cancelled TV show) across space (the US/world) despite the greatest efforts of the Alliance (the Network) to kill (cancel) the broadcasters (Joss and his buddies).

I think that's kind of fun, actually. I have a lot of respect for that. It's Joss saying "you all suck!" in a really constructive, dream-achieving sort of way. Good for him.

The one shadow cast on the whole thing, for me, began as nothing more than an unflattering portrayal of the film's only Jewish character -- "Mr. Universe".

So, he's high on himself, is proud of having married a femme-bot, and is a techno-wizard. Fine. I know plenty of Jews with unflattering characteristics. It makes me a little queasy to see it outright on the big screen, because things tend to get inflated and warped when they are presented in that way, but... it got much, much worse very quickly.

I'll be spoiling just a bit of the plot, but if you've read the Christian Bible, you'll know exactly where this is going:

So, the crew of the "Serenity" fly towards Mr. Universe's planet, where they hope to broadcast their secret message to the world. Mr. Universe says "come on in! the coast is clear" (I'm paraphrasing). Everything looks hunky-dory, until...

cut to inside Mr. Universe's personal techno-palace. He has lots and lots of Alliance troops standing around him, so it's clear he was forced to betray his friends. Fine. I'll buy that. I was going along with the plot just fine, feeling like "ah, that was a great little twist", when Mr. Universe turns to The Operative who leads the Alliance troops and says something like "Ok, now give me my thirty pieces of silver and-" at which point he is unceremoniously killed.

Thirty pieces of silver? Another Jew playing Judas? If his motives were self-protection, which is what I thought at first (what with so many guards standing around him), I'd have understood that, but by dropping this one little line, the entire scenario turns in to yet another version of the antisemitic "Jews vs Savior" (captain Mal, in this case) motif. Sure, the original narrative has Judas betraying Jesus for some cold, hard cash, but it's not originally a Jew vs. Christian story -- it's Jew vs. Jew. It's when Judas is taken out of the historical context of a predominantly Jewish society that he becomes an antisemite's tool. What does an antisemite care if a Jew betrays another Jew? The antisemite cares a lot if a Jew betrays someone else -- a hero, a savior, a Christ-figure (but not a Jewish one, like Jesus, of course).

That moment in the film made my blood run very cold. I hope it was an oversight made by people who have never really learned to be sensitive about this issue. If it was not, I am surprised that a greater outcry has not already begun.

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Corpse Bride

2005-09-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

Tim Burton. I don't know how to digest him quite yet.

The film itself is a lot of fun, in its own, macabre sort of way. The humor hits home with regularity, and the atmosphere, expertly woven by Burton and his team of... of whatever they are, is marvellously thrilling. Being countable months away from a wedding of my own added its own levels of creepiness to everything, of course.

But I really don't know how to digest Burton. There are aspects of this film which strike me as delightfully fresh -- provocatively edgy, and there are other aspects of this film which strike me as almost passive in their regularity... Perhaps it's the claymation, perhaps it's something else... somehow, all of the emotions in the film felt muted, despite the greatest range of human experience, from love to fear to mourning to death that appears in the film to varying degrees.

What I haven't been able to figure out is whether this muting of these emotional extremes is a blessing or a curse on the film itself.

On one hand, there might be a possibility that were these emotions somehow more emphatically evident, the film would have been too creepy, to hard to handle. It would have become too much of a zombie film with a heart.

On the other hand, perhaps had they been stronger, the film's story would have come across more powerfully than it did.

And that's just it, isn't it? For an edgy movie to be palletable, it has to be tame, which makes it harder for it to be edgy. That whole balance is where so many films go wrong, and it's one of a filmmaker's most dramatic challenges. I think Burton gets it. I enjoyed "Corpse Bride"... but... somehow, I'm still left wondering...

-AzS

Musing Pictures: Jaws

2005-06-03T11:04:00.000-05:00

When Chief Brody first sees the killer shark in Jaws, he turns in fear to captain Quint and says, I think were gonna need a bigger boat. In the summer of 1975, it wasnt a bigger boat that the folks at Paramount needed, but bigger theaters Spielbergs daring project was on its way to the history books as it packed movie houses across the country. This summer, the film celebrates its thirty years of scaring beachgoers and thrilling audiences across the globe.
Although the film predates me by several years, I did manage to catch it in its original big-screen glory at the Coolidge Corner Theater several years ago. It was at this screening, where the shark was life-sized, and the reluctant heroes even larger, that I began to realize the full power and mystique of Jaws. From the first two, ominous notes of John Williams haunting (and surprisingly complex) score, the crowd in the packed theater broke in to enthusiastic applause and they were not all fans. Even those in the audience who had never seen the film knew to recognize the music, which has been quoted and parodied in everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Shark Tale. From that moment, the atmosphere in the theater was downright electric. Fans of the film sat at the edge of their seats, eagerly getting swept up in the swashbuckling adventure flickering before them, while folks seeing the film for the first time sat back, slouched low, occasionally peeking through splayed fingers, searching the on-screen waters for the hidden, toothy monster.
I was there expecting to see the same film I knew and loved from TV, and from that well-worn VHS from the library. I was amazed to discover that despite the fun I had watching Jaws at home, the film ebbed and flowed with a shocking force and a terrible beauty in that theater in ways that I had never experienced. Spielberg shoots from the minds of his characters, and on the big screen, the full force of his cinematic storytelling comes through most clearly, where every angle of every shot, designed meticulously to reflect and project a mood or a sensation, dominates the field of vision.
I left the theater that evening realizing that I had been very dramatically moved by the film not to tears, but on a longer emotional journey, through suspense, fear and excitement, to a final, relieved joy, and to that mysterious feeling I occasionally get when I am told a story that is bigger than myself. I got that feeling when I looked around, and saw that it was shared by all of the theatergoers around me.
But what makes Jaws such a powerful film? Most of its younger fans never saw it in a theater, where its full, almost visceral force is unavoidable, but on TV, often chopped up by commercials.
When it comes down to it, I think it's all about the characters: A police chief who hates the water but lives on an island ("It's only an island if you look at it from the water"), a trust fund kid with cool toys who wants to swim (but not sleep) with the fishes, and an adventurer with dark tales and a temper. They're each a part of us in a way, representative of something we all share. The film is about them much more than it is about a shark. It's a lesson to modern filmmakers, with their new, special effects gadgets and toys: Tell a good story, and when the gadgets get out-dated, the story will last.

FYI: This weekend, the most significant of the films many 30th anniversary events begins on Marthas Vinyard, off Cape Cod, MA, where much of the film was shot. The island is expecting thousands of visitors, including younger fans who only caught the shark on television or home video, to gather at what will become an annual celebration of everything Jaws.

-AzS