Odds & Ends
Monday, January 23, 2006
Brokeback Mountain and al Qaeda: the Hidden Connection
It's really too soon to be editorialising on Brokeback Mountain again - particularly as I haven't seen it and probably won't have a chance to review it this weekend. There almost isn't any point arguing about this - from what I can gather, the film doesn't seem to say anything terribly controversial: when Fred Nile decries it, he's really just suggesting that he thinks a film about gay cowboys shouldn't exist, and if someone's that far gone there's not really much arguing that you can do with them. So I should just move on. But then I read this piece by Paul Gray in the Herald Sun. It starts out okay - pointing out that American commentator Steve Bennett is going a bit far in suggesting that Hollywood is trying to "homosexualise America." Fair call. But in amongst the disclaimers, Bennett's argument still seems to be getting a fair run from Gray: Yet Bennett is correct to highlight the apparently growing discrepancy between the interests of the general movie-going public and those who make the movies.Gray then cites Transamerica, Syriana, and the TV show Weeds as other examples, before continuing: Despite a complete lack of nuance in his argument, and a strong hint of personal hostility towards homosexuals in his remarks, critics such as Bennett have one thing clearly right. Hollywood is into minority issues. If we stick to Brokeback Mountain - and the other examples Gray cites are pretty trivial in terms of cultural impact - what's bizarre about this is the suggestion that a single gay love story could contribute to a "growing discrepancy" between the general public and the stories told by Hollywood. Sure, gays are a minority (in several senses of the word, but the strictly literal sense is enough to work with at the moment). But this is is just one movie. How many heterosexual romances has Hollywood turned out? Given virtually every movie features a heterosexual romance as a subplot, while Hollywood gay romances could be counted almost on one hand, heterosexually oriented films would outnumber gay romances by many thousands to one. Compared to the general population, Hollywood's representation of homosexuality is disproportionately small. But this kind of mathematics is beside the point, really. The issue is the selectivity of such concern about over-representation of minorities. If Gray really doesn't have a problem with gays, why is he so concerned about how often Hollywood chooses to depict them? Maverick cops with no respect for authority are a pretty small proportion of the population: is Gray equally concerned about the disproportionate number of cop movies being made? Can we expect that editorial next week? Brokeback Mountain is a romance that just happens to be about gay men: it is controversial only because a segment of the population has a problem with homosexuality. Gray is at pains to point out his tolerance to gays in the hilariously revealing middle passage of his article. He cites with approval lyrics from The Producers that note: "Let's face it, without fags and gypsies, there is no theatre." It's kind of like saying "I'm not a racist: I think Asian restaurants are great." I don't have a problem with La Cage Aux Folles / The Birdcage style gay humour, as such, but let's not insist that that's the only appropriate way for gays to be represented on screen. This is what discrimination is all about: on-screen heterosexuals aren't defined by their sexuality, and can therefore fill any role from romantic lead to villain, but gays should remain in camp roles that emphasise their contribution to musical theatre. All this I would normally have just let go without comment: I think those who aren't homophobic should find the above comments pretty self-evident, and stopping to point these things out is dignifying a debate that shouldn't exist. Yet the final paragraphs of Gray's article chart a new low even by Herald Sun standards:
So let me get this straight. The Herald Sun - Australia's most read daily newspaper - is publishing an opinion piece that implies that we should moderate our expression of tolerance for minority groups on the basis that it might offend would-be terrorists? Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 23.1.06 - 2 comments  
Please God No
When the talk started of Disney buying Pixar a few days ago, I discounted it. But it's suddenly everywhere, and The Daily Telegraph reckons its happening today. Amid Amidi over at Cartoon Brew is suprisingly upbeat: At this point, it's easy to see it going either way: either Lasseter and company will shine their creative light upon Disney helping to revitalize the Mouse's slumbering animation division or Disney's corporate bureaucracy will drag down Pixar with it and we'll enter a new era of films like THE INCREDIBLES MEET WOODY AND BUZZ.I wish I could agree that the upside was there. To me this seems roughly equivalent to deciding that a mix of Grange Hermitage and orange juice is going to taste better than either on its own. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 23.1.06 - 0 comments
RIP: Norm McCabe
Just a quick post to note the passing of Norm McCabe, who died on 18 January aged 94. McCabe was the last of the directors from the Warner Bros animation studio in its classic era: a handful of animators are left alive (Bill Melendez pops up looking very sprightly in interviews on the Looney Tunes DVD sets, for example) but now all the directors and notable story artists are gone. I'm not terribly familiar with McCabe's cartoons: he certainly wasn't a major director, and like Arthur Davis only got a short spell as director (he left the position for military service). Unlike Davis, who is pretty well regarded by Warners fans, his cartoons aren't very frequently revived. However, like Joe Grant, the guy had staying power: he was doing work on Tiny Toon Adventures in his eighties. A little more about McCabe can be found here, here, and here. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 23.1.06 - 0 comments
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Journey Up the Nile
I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain, but I'm already glad it won the Golden Globe for Best Drama. Why? Because it will upset people such as the conservative politician Fred Nile, who in this story on (Australian) ABC radio spoke out against the film. But he has our interests at heart: he's trying to spare us from confusion. To quote from the ABC's story: FRED NILE: I think it's causing a great confusion to have two homosexual cowboys after all the popularity of the cowboy theme in American themes [sic].To avoid such "confusion" (by which I suspect he means "deep-seated torment about how to reconcile homophobic views with message of love promoted by Jesus") we should stick to traditional old-fashioned westerns like, say, Calamity Jane. Of course, we're safer if the film can only confuse us on video: DANIEL HOARE (Reporter): Christian groups led by New South Wales upper house member Fred Nile, from the Christian Democratic Party, say Brokeback Mountain should be released on video for the gay community rather than be released on the big screen.... [Later in report, to Nile] So you don't think this movie is suitable for a mass-market audience?Well, obviously only people from the homosexual community would want to see the new film by Ang Lee. Or is the concern that if it's seen by heterosexuals, it will somehow convert them to gayness? If that's Nile's concern, he might be barking up the wrong tree in terms of calling for no distribution, or limiting it to video, or only showing it to over 18's. Surely the real answer is a mandatory double-bill. Brokeback Mountain could be the first item, but then before we all go off to enjoy some show tunes and interior decorating, they could immediately put on a good old-fashioned movie about real blokes, like Dirty Harry, to heterosexualise us all again. Like the ABC, I'll leave the final word to Margaret Pomeranz. Given Pomeranz is one of those suspicious left-wingers you keep hearing about from Andrew Bolt, you might have suspected she would have directly attacked the bigotry underlying the attacks on Brokeback Mountain. She probably did, but what the ABC chose to close with instead was this great quote: MARGARET POMERANZ: Do you know what I thought when I saw it? I thought, someone's making movies about romance again, you know, all those great Bette Davis, Joan Crawford films about true love of the '30s and '40s, you know. I mean, we seem to have forgotten those, because everybody's so cynical. But this is a film, really such a romantic film.Thank you. I love this quote, because it seems calculated to mess with Nile's head. I can see him struggling to reconcile it now. Romantic? Old-fashioned? Gay? That, I suspect, is what Nile finds confusing. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 21.1.06 - 2 comments
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Serkis Performer
The animation directors on Peter Jackson's King Kong were Christian Rivers and Eric Leighton. I mention this because from all the media coverage, you might assume that Andy Serkis was the single-handed creator of the character of Kong, just as many sources suggest that he was the single-handed creator of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. It has been suggested, for example, that Serkis' work on both characters was worthy of Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (and, indeed, Serkis did win several acting awards for Gollum, as listed on his website). Yet, as should be obvious, Serkis is not the sole creator of either performance: both Gollum and Kong represent a blend of the performances by Serkis and the various animators at Weta Digital. Even an article as informative as this one at ComingSoon.Net - which does discuss the split between Serkis' work and the animators in some detail - is based only on Serkis' account and runs under the headline "Andy Serkis IS King Kong." And of course the credits of the movie include a credit reading simply "Andy Serkis as Kong." I'm not trying to have a go at Serkis here. I think his collaboration with the animators at Weta on these characters is extremely important and groundbreaking work. Gollum, in particular, pushed the level of acting and psychological complexity we expect from digital characters, and exposed the mediocrity of the work on Jar Jar Binks and Yoda in the new Star Wars films. (Indeed, the weakness of George Lucas' animators has been a bugbear of mine since as long ago as 1997, as witnessed by these comments on the rejigged Star Wars). And I think an Oscar could easily have been justified for that work: I just think it should have been a special achievement Oscar, awarded to the entire crew who worked on Gollum, rather than just Serkis. It's a shame that this oversimplification has occurred, as the Serkis / Weta collaborations fundamentally reshape the way we think about the relationship between live and animated performances. Live reference footage has been used since the days of the earliest hand-drawn animated features: the animators on Snow White (1937) used reference footage on Snow White and the Prince, for example. Animation can be directly derived from the footage by tracing it, using a device known as a rotoscope, but the conventional wisdom has been that over-reliance on rotoscoping leads to poor animation. Better animated "acting" is achieved where the animators used the reference footage as a jumping-off point only, and adjusted the characters so that they gave a less literal performance: films such as Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings (1978) were full of dull rotoscoped animation, and the results were unsatisfying. In computer animation, the equivalent is motion capture, where the performance of a live actor is captured digitally, and this has been the subject of a similar stigma. It isn't, as far as I can tell, heavily used in the creation of Pixar's films, for example, as they use relatively cartoony designs and consequently need a different type of performance. (I suspect, however, that it was used quite a bit for human characters in the Shrek films). Motion capture has been associated much more with animation that interacts with live action footage, as in the Star Wars prequels, and here the naturalness of its motion is of more obvious value. There has been a divide, then, between what you might call the special effects tradition and the cartoon tradition in computer animation. The literal realism of motion capture has been highly suited to the former, while the latter has tended to rely more on animator-driven performance. The most notable predecessor to Gollum, Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace, tried to marry the two approaches, but without much success. Much of the animation of Jar Jar's body was derived from the performance of Ahmed Best, but the character's facial features were so removed from a human's that his performance could only be used as reference footage for the facial animation. What's more, Best didn't try to give a natural performance: his walking action for Jar Jar, for example, is that of a human trying to walk like a cartoon character. Jar Jar offered no opportunity for psychological complexity, or a performance of any but the most basic sort. This is why Gollum was so much more notable an achievement. He was a psychologically complex character: indeed, he was effectively two characters, as his mind had been fractured into the the evil Gollum and the (comparatively) good Smeagol. It was the first time someone had entrusted a digital character with such a key role in the movie, and the robust performance was an impressive blend of motion capture and animator-driven techniques. Between them, Serkis and the Weta crew had managed to combine the expressiveness of an animated performance with the realism of motion capture. Old assumptions about the merits of motion capture were thrown out the window, and the character showed that it really was possible to combine the best of both worlds. The title character in King Kong was in some ways even more challenging. There wasn't the crutch of dialogue to express the character's thoughts and feelings, for starters, and as the depiction is of a recognisable (albeit exaggerated) real-world animal, the audience has more of a real-life reference to judge the character against. Yet the final result is if anything even more impressive than Gollum: while not as revolutionary, Kong is even more realistic. As I said in my review of the film, he is always gorilla-like, while at the same time the range of and complexity of emotion he displays is quite startling. The performance has revived the interest in these groundbreaking digital characters, but once again, there has been a tendency for critics and journalists to fudge the story by assuming Serkis = Kong. Yet Kong is arguably less Serkis' performance than Gollum was. There isn't as extensive a vocal performance, for example. And while Serkis did provide some on-set performance reference for Naomi Watts, given the difference in size between actor and character, this could not have been as tangible an interaction as occurred with Serkis, Elijah Wood and Sean Astin on the set of The Lord of the Rings. Finally, there is a greater difference in physiology between the giant gorilla in King Kong and the essentially humanoid Gollum: there would have been more need for animators to adjust Serkis' performance, simply because Kong's face and body are constructed so differently. VFXWorld (in a very interesting article I can't link to because it requires registration to view) states that only 25% of Kong's facial animation was derived from Serkis. While that may well have been the key 25% (such as the scene where Ann wins Kong over), even this animation must have taken a fair bit of "finishing." If you look at the facial animation on Kong, particularly when he is angry, you'll see his expressions are well beyond what a human face can achieve. So the character of Kong is a collaborative exercise, rather than a star turn by one actor. Yet once the importance of that collaborative effort is understood, pointing this out doesn't need to be a slight on Serkis. After all, pretending that a digital character is just like a costume that an actor wears - and I've seen this argued, in so many words - is not only insulting to the animators who co-create that character, it also distorts the understanding of what's important about Serkis' work. It suggests that all he's done, conceptually, is a variation on the performance by Rick Baker inside a monkey suit in the 1976 version. Ultimately, being part of a team effort that revolutionises the way we think about animated performance is more significant than being the sole creator of just another convincing monkey. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 15.1.06 - 1 comments
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