Odds & Ends
Monday, October 24, 2005
Craig, Daniel Craig
The news that Daniel Craig will take over the role of James Bond in the upcoming Casino Royale has been greeted with a brief flurry of perfunctory publicity, but what seems to be general apathy. It's not hard to see why: as Jaime J. Weinman put it, "The Bond movies are basically the big-budget equivalent of an endlessly-running TV adventure show, and replacing Bond doesn't mean much more than replacing Dr. Who." Which, as a Bond fan, is sad but indisputably accurate.  What interests me most about the decision to axe Brosnan and use Craig is both its perversity and its eerie echoes of the handover from Sean Connery to George Lazenby for 1969's On Her Majesties Secret Service (hereafter OHMSS). Perverse, because Brosnan had been agitating for ages that he wanted to do a tougher, grittier, more Fleming-inspired take on Bond, and Quentin Tarantino has been advocating a "straight" adaptation of Casino Royale for a couple of years. Brosnan has been the best thing the Bond series has had going for it recently - he has been an excellent Bond in generally indifferent movies. Tarantino, of course, could have been just the shot in the arm the series needed. As I argued here when the Casino Royale idea was first floated, the Tarantino Bond film could have been done as a one-off "art Bond" project without upsetting the whole series, possibly as a farewell film for Brosnan. Instead, the producers have spurned Brosnan, rejected Tarantino... and then gone with the mediocre action director Martin Campbell, and Daniel Craig as Bond, to do a version of Casino Royale that is reportedly - you guessed it - a return to Fleming's source, including making it an origin story a la Batman Begins. It seems to be all downside with no upside: they are taking the risk of "rebooting" the series, but not choosing to take advantage of the talents who had advocated taking that chance in the first place. The parallels with the situation in 1969 are interesting. For those who haven't read the books, Casino Royale is, like OHMSS, one of the key novels in terms of defining the character. In the case of OHMSS, this carried through to the film series. (I'm going to move into some spoilers here: while I'll tread lightly on the events of Casino Royale, I'm going to reveal the end to OHMSS, on the grounds that it's much more familiar to most filmgoers). In OHMSS, you'll recall, Bond marries, but has his wife slain by Blofeld on his wedding day: it's an event that is referred to occasionally in the subsequent films (most explicitly in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and Licence to Kill, but obliquely elsewhere) and which provides a tragic undertone that has forever informed the understanding of who Bond is. The entire arc of the 1960s Bond films (which work as a serial in a way the later films don't) works up to this event, and OHMSS is one of a very short list of Bonds that stands as a film classic in its own right. The irony of all this is that the series took this dramatic turn after Sean Connery had quit the series out of frustration. Connery was concerned about typecasting and wanted to branch out, and he announced that he was quitting during the filming of You Only Live Twice (1967), which was the film that defined what would become the worst aspects of the Bond series. The first of the series to completely discard Fleming's source novel, it's overlong, flabbily directed, and represents the start of the treatment of Bond as purely a fantasy figure (rather than a real character who enters borderline fantasy scenarios). Watching it, it is easy to see why Connery grew disenchanted - but as soon as he left, the producers went back to basics for the truly excellent OHMSS. The only weakness of that film is Lazenby, and watching it, you can't help but wonder how Connery would have responded to the acting challenge of giving us a real, vulnerable Bond in love. For the next film they got Connery back - but made Diamonds Are Forever, a dreadful mishmash that totally ignored the events of the preceding film and built to a climactic scene of death rays from space. And Connery quit again. It's unlikely that Daniel Craig will be another Lazenby - while we won't know for sure until the film comes out, he seems to have been chosen to put a "proper actor" in the role, a la Timothy Dalton in 1987. And that's a promising sign going into Casino Royale, which turns on Bond's relationship with a fellow intelligence worker named Vesper Lynd. In the novels, she is the other love of Bond's life, and the conclusion of their relationship is another key moment in Bond's history. I hope the producers do have the courage not to jazz it up too much (the later portions of the novel give way almost entirely to character based drama), and look forward to seeing Craig's take on Bond. But just like Connery back in 1969, Brosnan deserved a shot at it. Unlike Connery, Brosnan was ready and willing, which just makes it more puzzling. It has been rumoured that he asked for too much money, but it's difficult to believe he wasn't worth it. Brosnan isn't an actor of the calibre of Connery (who was spectacularly good in the first few Bonds, before he got bored of the role) but he had managed the difficult task of being fully accepted by the public as Bond. That's a tricky thing to do, and being good in the role isn't enough: Timothy Dalton was an excellent actor, but he never caught the public's imagination. That kind of identification between actor and role is a rare thing, and the series hasn't enjoyed it since Connery. (Despite the length of tenure in the part, Roger Moore always violently divided opinion, and simply isn't Bond to many: he's just Roger Moore doing Bond schtick). Those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them, and something tells me that Bond fans will be left dreaming of the Brosnan Casino Royale in much the same way that they rue the missed chance of the Connery OHMSS. For more on my views on the decision to adapt Casino Royale as the next Bond film, see this earlier post. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 24.10.05 - 0 comments  
Saturday, October 22, 2005
But Henry... What Will the Neighbours Think?
You notice all sorts of things when you can (finally) see a cartoon on DVD. This is from Chuck Jones' classic Three Bears short A Bear For Punishment (1951):  The things DVD can tell you about the lives of cartoon characters. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 22.10.05 - 0 comments
Monday, October 17, 2005
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Honest Director
iFMagazine has a really interesting update - brought to my attention by Dark Horizons - on the status of the sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean. It's interesting not because I care about the sequels (I enjoyed the first film, but it screamed "fluke" to me and I always expected any sequels to resemble Cutthroat Island), but for what an overly candid director can let slip about the production process for Hollywood movies today: Although the movies are shot back-to-back, Verbinski reveals they're shooting both films simultaneously with both scripts constantly in flux.
This says a lot about how Hollywood blockbusters can go off the rails. As my hypothetical longtime readers will know, I'm not one who says that Hollywood is going downhill (see here), but when films are produced like this, it does seem kind of miraculous that the big studios do manage to produce any decent films at all. Firstly, the Pirates sequels have been put into production before the scripts are complete. It should be obvious that a lack of a script is going to be a recipe for disaster, and complaints about weak scripts for blockbusters are a familiar refrain amongst critics. The problem persists because of the simple reality that the screenwriting process can be squeezed in a way that no other part of the production process can. Studios build a release schedule around the delivery of a movie on a certain date, and because so many films are "packages" of star, director, and actors, this commitment is frequently made when no script exists. (Picking up a script, and then trying to cast it, is far from the norm, and even when the script does come first, the attachment of particular talent might trigger rewrites anyway). Having locked in a date, most phases of the production require a certain finite period of time that can't really be compressed. When a project is making a late run at its opening date, there is very limited scope to accelerate principal photography or the construction of sets, for example. Some aspects of post-production (editing, scoring, special effects, etc) can be accelerated a little, but this usually either costs a lot or saves only a little time. So the sacrifice is often made at script level: the film moves ahead before people are happy with the script (perhaps with the rationalisation that it can be fixed on the run). While it might seem obvious that this is likely to lead to a flawed film, script problems are a minor concern for studios: they only rarely tip a production into chaos (as appears to be happening to the Pirates sequels), so they don't cost anyone money in a tangible, measurable way. The cost of a bad script is lost revenue due to the film being no good when it's released, and that's hard to quantify. What's more, from a studio's point of view, you can see why they don't want to risk a key date just to give a writer longer to hone a script: after all, there's no actual guarantee the extra time will make it any better. Trying to discern the vagaries of a writer's creative process must seem a pretty unproductive way for businessmen to spend their time: much better to just manage the logistical side as best you can and let the lightning of artistic inspiration fall where it will. Films do sometimes triumph over compressed schedules and rushed scripts. However, usually the best a director can hope for is to paper over the plotholes and make something moderately entertaining out of their ramshackle first draft script. (A really textbook example of this kind of film is Jurassic Park, which ran out of time for script rewrites and went ahead with a last minute draft that David Koepp whipped together in a matter of weeks. As a result, there are whole scenes that go nowhere, characters that are written out awkwardly, and a host of other problems that would have been smoothed out in any subsequent draft). Even by these sort of standards, however, the Pirates sequels are showing a particularly swashbuckling sense of adventure in terms of forging ahead with incomplete scripts. One of the keys to good sequel-making is to have some overall idea of where the series is headed and how the sequels build on each other: this is notable in series such as the original Star Wars, Harry Potter and Spiderman films, where the sense of multi-film story arcs is very strong. (Even the early Bond films had a multi-film arc that built from Dr No to a climax in On Her Majesties Secret Service). This is all the more important where sequels are filmed back-to-back. This is usually only done where there is a really tightly worked-out scenario that everyone is certain of (and, of course, when good box-office is almost guaranteed). Examples include The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Back to the Future parts two and three, and the first two Superman films. While the latter example ran off the rails somewhat due to discord and disorganisation behind the scenes, those projects are notable for the way in which an overall story arc for the concurrently filmed parts was very clear from day one. When Peter Jackson suggested the key to such a production model was reshoots, I imagine he took it for granted that those involved would have some basic knowledge of what was to happen in each film during principal photography. By contrast, it seems that the only overarching idea driving the Pirates sequels is that all involved thought it would be great to make more money... and the only idea behind filming them back-to-back was that it would be great to make twice as much money. Labels: rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.10.05 - 2 comments
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Bob Clampett: It Can Happen Here
The second wave of Looney Tunes DVDs - consisting of The Best of Bugs Bunny Volume 2, All Stars Volume 3, The Best of Tweety and Sylvester Volume 1, and The Best of the Road Runner Volume 1 - is now in Australian stores. The documentaries in these are much better than the first round, and the best of them is a solid twenty minute documentary on Bob Clampett. This, and the inclusion in this wave of several of Clampett's best cartoons (including Porky in Wackyland, Kitty Kornered, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, and A Corny Concerto) should help raise awareness of Clampett's work. Clampett is much better known than he used to be, but there remains, I think, a huge discrepancy in the way in which his reputation has grown. Amongst animation buffs he now rivals Tex Avery and Chuck Jones as the most revered American animator outside of Disney, and yet he has never become a household name in the way that Jones, Avery or Friz Freleng have. In the wider popular consciousness, fate has conspired to leave one of the major Warner directors a relative unknown, and it's well past time for a more widespread rediscovery of his work. A number of factors combined to lead to this relative obscurity in the non-fan community. Perhaps most critically, Warner Bros. for many years lost control of its pre-1948 animation library, meaning that until the early 1990s, cartoons made before that date did not turn up on Warners-backed shows such as The Bugs Bunny Show. This meant that the work of earlier directors such as Clampett, Avery, Frank Tashlin, and Arthur Davis was massively under-represented on television during the period in which many discovered Warner Bros cartoons. Clampett died in 1984, just as interest in Warners animation was being stimulated by a generation of baby boomers who had grown up with the shorts: this meant that Friz Freleng and especially Chuck Jones were left as the elder statesmen of the studio, and the focus of the most media attention. It also didn't help that Jones fell out with Clampett, and downplayed his importance. Jones pointedly left Clampett out of both the survey of Bugs Bunny's "fathers" in The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Movie (1979), and his discussion of other Warner directors in his autobiography Chuck Amuck (1989). The irony here is that the most likely reason for the resentment of Clampett was a perception that he was glory hound who had himself claimed too much credit in early interviews (such as this one, from Michael Barrier's Funnyworld magazine). Voice artist Mel Blanc complained in his own autobiography that Clampett was an "egotist who took credit for everything."  Porky makes a shocking discovery about Bugs in Clampett's A Corny Concerto What this means is that if you grew up with the Warner cartoons of Jones and Freleng, but have never discovered Clampett, there's a rich vein of great cartoons to catch up with. What's more, the Clampett cartoons are, if anything, more representative of what the studio stood for: they really are the definitive Warner cartoons. The Warner Bros. cartoon studio built its reputation on its status as the "anti-Disney:" in contrast to the perceived sentimentality and ideological conformity of Disney animation, Warners cartoons are notable for their irreverence, wild humour, and sheer exuberance. Nobody's cartoons epitomised that style more than Clampett - the best cartoons from Jones and Freleng are positively muted by comparison. Perhaps more importantly, though, Clampett helped create that style, whereas Jones and Freleng followed in the wake of other trailblazers. In the mid 1930s, when the Warners studio was just another second-rung turning out pale imitations of Disney's work, the crucial move to start trying riskier material was made by two directors: Avery and Clampett. In 1937 Avery directed the first Daffy Duck short, with Clampett doing the crucial animation of Daffy. Clampett started directing later the same year, and in the last few years of the 1930s the directors effectively discovered the wilder Warners style. Avery would do his best work at MGM (his only really great Warners cartoon is A Wild Hare, the definitive Bugs Bunny short), but Clampett would stay at Warners until 1946, by which time he had led the studio well into its golden age. Chuck Jones was a peripheral figure in this first period of innovation: he was directing by 1938, but in these early years his work was slow, dull, and Disney-esque. He didn't start consistently making funny cartoons until the second half of the 1940s, after Clampett had departed. Effectively, then, there were two main phases of the Warners golden age: the early years (1937 to about 1946) in which the sensibilities of Avery and Clampett dominated, with Jones, Freleng, and Tashlin following their lead; and the later years (from about 1946 to the late 1950s) in which Jones came to be the dominant director, supported by Freleng and Robert McKimson. For the reasons I've already described the latter period is the one most people are familiar with, and these cartoons show the Warners style in its mature form: the directors know what they are doing, and do it well, but the cartoons lack the youthful exuberance of those from the earlier, less frequently revived years. Jones, in particular, was an impeccable director in his best period and deserves most of the praise heaped upon him. Yet he was an intellectually driven director who was highly analytical in his approach, and he never matched the freneticism and wild abandon that Clampett brought to his cartoons. Even today, with all the hyper-activity of modern electronic media, Clampett's cartoons remain startling. The Clampett philosophy is perhaps best stated by the sign that marks the boundary to the surreal landscape of Wackyland in Clampett's early classic Porky in Wackyland: "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE." In Clampett's cartoons, anything can happen. This is not simply the comically motivated impossibilities that occur in typical Freleng and Jones cartoons (like Wile E Coyote or Sylvester surviving being blown up with dynamite). Instead, the world of Clampett's cartoons is notable for its unmotivated, even threatening acts of craziness. Characters are often hysterical, infantile, aggressive, insane, or combinations thereof. His graphical style is defined by its emphasis on extreme, almost vulgar bodily shapes, and loose, free-flowing animation. Clampett took the kind of bodily distortion that most other directors would reserve for heightened "takes" and made them the norm. Where characters in other directors' work have a "standard" look and then slip into carefully held key poses for comic effect, Clampett's characters flow from one to another in a ceaseless mutation. All this would be too much if Clampett was working in a longer format, but for a six-to-seven minute cartoon, what it brings is an exhilarating energy. Clampett's cartoons are, quite simply, funnier minute-for-minute than pretty much any other animation ever made. A Corny Concerto (his send-up of Fantasia) is essentially two 3-minute shorts attached end-to-end, as programs in an Elmer Fudd-hosted concert feature, and each is as rich and satisfying as a full cartoon by another director. There isn't ever any sense of pretension or self-consciousness about Clampett's work: his cartoons are rapid-fire exercises in making the audience laugh.  Porky takes aim: a vertiginous Clampett composition from Kitty Kornered Yet there is enormous thought behind them: looking at them closely, as the new DVDs allow you to do, you can see what an artist Clampett was. The design in them is very strong: he uses extreme angles, character poses and colour designs to increase the impact of shots or punctuate key moments. At some points, he has the characters play against featureless coloured backgrounds for dramatic effect. His framing and camera movement is consistently inventive, with very short shots (sometimes as brief as a few frames), whip pans, and extremely close or far shorts employed with enormous confidence. What distinguishes Clampett's use of these devices is not so much that he does them in the first place, but how quickly he piles them on. Chuck Jones had a similar grasp of the language of film, and used many of the same effects Clampett did, but just as his character poses draw more attention to themselves, so too his visual flourishes are more calculated. When Jones uses an outlandish visual design, you are supposed to notice, but when Clampett does so, it comes and goes so quickly there is no time to think about it. This makes his technique all the more effective: there's no time for appreciation, only gut-level reaction. It's impressive filmmaking by any standard: that it occurs in what were at the time under-appreciated throwaways is all the more remarkable. If you haven't seen these films, you really owe it to yourself to check them out. Note: If you want to pick up some of Clampett's work, the best of the new disks is The Best of Tweety and Sylvester, which includes Porky in Wackyland, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Kitty Kornered, Baby Bottleneck, and the Clampett documentary. A Corny Concerto is on the All Stars Volume 3 disk. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 11.10.05 - 0 comments
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