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
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 09, 2012
Musing Pictures: War Horse (2011)
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.
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
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Musing Pictures: The Thing (1982
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
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
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Musing Pictures: The Adventures of Tintin
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
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
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Musing Pictures: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
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
"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
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Musing Pictures: Tower Heist
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
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
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Musing Pictures: Moneyball
"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
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
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