Oscar Notes: The Nominees

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"

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

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

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

"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.

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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)

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

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