Odds & Ends
Monday, May 28, 2007
An Article So Good You'll Want a Sequel
One of my happy discoveries of the last few months has been that David Bordwell has his own website (with longtime writing partner Kristin Thompson); Bordwell is one of the best film academics around, and his writing is always stimulating. (I also have his latest book The Way Hollywood Tells It on my shelf waiting to be read - only the fact that it arrived with Michael Barriers' The Animated Man and J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars has kept me from it). One thing I enjoy about his writing is that he avoids the same complacent narratives you hear all the time. He knows his film history and film art better than anybody - he's co-author of Film Art and Film History: An Introduction, the books from which just about everybody else learnt what they know - and he doesn't just settle for the simple familiar story we always hear. So, for example he and some similarly minded colleagues have responded in this article here to the common refrain that sequels are the ultimate creative cop-out, that Hollywood just wants to sell us the same idea over and over again, blah blah blah. (Bordwell is too polite to put it quite this way, but for my own money the way the film press tediously recycles this basic premise every American summer is as good an example of autopilot as the summer sequel season itself). To give you just a sample, here's Paul Ramaekar quoted in the above linked piece: I have a theory. In the contemporary comic-book blockbuster, the sequels will always be better than the first entries. Spider-Man 2 is better than Spider-Man, X-Men 2 is better than X-Men, and I will bet that The Dark Knight will be better than Batman Begins, just as Batman Returns was better than Batman. The pattern seems to me to be that the first film in the series is relatively impersonal - the franchise must be established as a franchise, meaning that few boats will be rocked, and the director must prove that they can handle both a film on that scale, and can be trusted with the property with all the investment it represents. I just wish a few more of the film academia or general press could bring themselves to move past their preconceived notions of creative bankruptcy into this kind of engagement with what Hollywood actually does. Labels: bordwell, commentary, sequels Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 28.5.07 - 0 comments  
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Long Shots
If you had more respect for the idea of blogging than I do, you could really bemoan the influence that YouTube has had on the practice. It seems a lot of bloggers, exhausted by coming up with new content all the time, have been sinking back to what I do on this corner of my site all the time: just posting interesting YouTube videos. But there are times this trend to YouTube blogging is undeniably useful, as with this post on great long tracking shots, complete with many YouTube clips giving examples. These are the ultimate show-off shots (Jaime J. Weinman talks about their unobtrusive cousins, long uncut dialogue scenes) and it's fun to see so many in one place. Some of the discussion on the post is interesting, and highlights the way technology has blurred the distinctions about what counts as a long take. It's always been the case that cuts might be "hidden" in a shot like this (typically through a whip-pan, object moving across the foreground, or a flash of light or darkness) but the means of doing this are becoming increasingly elaborate. In an old-school example like the opening shot of Touch of Evil or Robert Altman's send-up of it in The Player (clips of both are in the linked post) the virtuosity is in performance and on-set technical ingenuity. But in some of the more recent examples the digital assists in terms of hiding cuts and other cheats are quite involved, and the trickery is shared with the digital technicians who stitch everything together. A few of the commenters on that thread mention this shot from Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and it's a really good example of what I mean (the shot starts a little bit into the clip): I'm not quite sure how many disguised cuts there are in that scene; there are a couple of obvious examples in the pull-outs from the car (where cuts are hidden with wipes from passing traffic), but then each shot itself is put together from so many elements that the very idea of what constitutes a "take" gets murky. For example, this was presumably shot with Cruise and the kids in a car on a greenscreen stage, and then blended with location shots of the freeway, but there are probably multiple disguised cuts in that location footage while the focus is on the car. And there are moments as the camera moves into the car where the shot in the car seems to shift as we pull in, so we effectively have a transition between shots in a small part of the frame while the "outer" shot remains unbroken. Perhaps this takes the fun out of it, but it also opens up horizons: the War of the Worlds shot is extraordinary when you stop to think about it: this is a (seemingly) unbroken shot in which the camera circles a speeding car as it drives several miles down a freeway. We tend to get blase about this stuff these days, and perhaps the digital trickery has taken the fun out of such shots. But before you get too misty-eyed about the old-fashioned craftsmanship, take a look at Touch of Evil again. In addition to its two most famous long takes it also has a dialogue scene in which the camera is fixed to a moving car; taken together, they strongly resemble Spielberg's shot. Welles was a sucker for the most advanced techniques of his day, and he would have loved the tools filmmakers have today. Labels: close analysis, long shots, spielberg Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.5.07 - 0 comments
Friday, May 25, 2007
He Shouldn't Have Released Him
Just a nod to the thirtieth anniversary of Star Wars. (This sentence is just filler to get around a layout bug in Blogger - if you can see it, please ignore it). Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 25.5.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Tintin!
If you've been anywhere near the film geek webpages during the week you'll have seen this news: Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are making movies of Herge's comic book series The Adventure of Tintin. Spielberg in particular has been mentioned in relation to this property before, but it really seems to be moving forward now. Courtesy of Variety:
I have mixed feelings about this whole thing, but I'm certainly very interested. Tintin was a staple of my childhood; as I got a bit older, I cast them aside, deciding that the other big comic book series, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix was a bit hipper. Yet I came full circle when I revisited the Tintin books as an adult. They might superficially be pitched a little younger than the jokey Asterix books, but Herge was clearly the superior artist. His beautifully simple graphical style and grasp of the comic book form really sets the Tintin books apart. He also showed remarkable facility at different genres: the Tintin books range from the full-blown adventure of sending Tintin to the moon (in Explorers on the Moon) to the minimalist house-bound mystery of The Castafiore Emerald, a comic drama where the ultimate joke is that Herge generates a whole book around nothing of consequence. A lot of the books would work really well as films (and several versions already exist in both live action and animation, as you can read here), and both Spielberg and Jackson make sense as directors for the project. Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, for example, are not too far from the spirit of the most adventure-based of the Tintin books, while Peter Jackson, with King Kong particularly, also ventured in something of a similar direction. And who wouldn't like to see the two in a semi-collaboration? Jackson is the George Lucas of the new millennium, and you could imagine him bringing out the best in Spielberg in much the way Lucas did back in the early 1980s with Raiders of the Lost Ark. What worries me a little bit is the references to the animation technology to be used for the project. Peter Jackson's effects house Weta have apparently produced a 20 minute test reel of computer animated motion capture footage. Variety again: Jackson's New Zealand-based WETA Digital, the f/x house behind "The Lord of the Rings" franchise, produced a 20-minute test reel bringing to life the characters created by Remi, who wrote under the pen name of Herge.I would love to see that test footage, and I have enormous respect for the Weta people, who are far and away the best effects house at the moment and who did amazing work in the Lord of the Rings series and King Kong. But it doesn't quite sound right. Herge's signature style is based on simple linework, little shading and flat areas of colour: it is, apparently, one of the definitive examples of what has become known as the ligne clair ("clear line") style. So, for example, here's a classic image of Tintin and Snowy:  The obvious way to film this style is in conventional hand-drawn animation: while not all comic-strip drawing styles can be translated into animation, there's nothing terribly difficult about translating Herge's style. Yet Jackson and Spielberg are avoiding this option, presumably for a combination of reasons. Firstly, neither has a close relationship with a traditional animation shop (since Dreamworks Animation, which Spielberg helped establish, has gotten out of that business). Secondly, it would be harder to distinguish a traditionally animated feature from the earlier Tintin features that have already been made, and computer animation is seen as more marketable anyway. And finally, neither director has the skills to direct a hand-drawn feature themselves, since there's really very little common ground between the process of directing live-action and animation. Motion capture on the Robert Zemeckis / Polar Express model seemingly bridges that gap. It's an illusion, though. As I said when whinging about George Miller's direction of Happy Feet, the idea that live-action directors can capably direct computer-animation is something of a misconception: to date, there has been little evidence that those who have done so have understood the particular qualities of the medium in which they've worked. But perhaps more to the point, it is difficult to see how Herge's style would translate to computer animation. Simple, clean styles like Herge's work well in comic strip or traditional animation, but computer animation doesn't do that kind of thing well. Think of Mickey Mouse: the pure black circles of his ears work really well as a graphical shorthand when drawn, but in computer animation - which is more literal, and makes us resolve shapes into actual volumes - those circles quickly look very strange, like giant bowling balls. It's hard to see how Tintin would be any different. If kept simple, the characters features would quickly become grotesque (Tintin's head would end up looking like a melon), but I can't imagine how the more photo-realistic style Jackson evokes ("the pores of their skin and each individual hair") would reconcile with Herge's style. So I'm just hoping that demo reel really pulled a rabbit out of a hat. One other thing: the Variety story says that Jackson and Spielberg have three stories in mind, but doesn't say which ones. The obvious puzzle is which ones they've chosen. Here are my picks: Tintin in Tibet I think this one's the most certain. It's often cited as Herge's masterpiece, and certainly its beautiful visuals (with its stark white mountain environments) should look great on film. It also has the strongest emotional centre of any of the books, with the adventure being compelled by Tintin's search for his missing friend Chang. Put this down for Jackson. The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun These two have everything: some occult elements, interesting locations (ranging from Captain Haddock's home at Marlinspike to South America), good stuff for supporting characters like the Thomson twins and Calculus, and lots of big action set-pieces. As long as they fix the silly ending (in which the characters are saved by an eclipse) it should work really well. I'm very confident on these as well, and could see either Jackson, Spielberg, or another director doing them. The Calculus Affair The third one's a bit of a roughie. I could imagine either of the other double volumes (Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham's Treasure or Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon) being tempting, but looking at them, I'm not sure either would film specially well. So my pick is The Calculus Affair; after Tintin in Tibet it's the one I'd make if I were Jackson or Spielberg. If I'm right about the other two, then I think it becomes particularly likely: its espionage thriller style would make a great change from the more swashbuckling tone of the others. The central plot (about the fight for control of a cold war superweapon) is kind of retro but still compelling. And it has some awesome action sequences, including a helicopter / boat chase and another in a tank. Put this down for Spielberg. So there are my guesses. You read it here first. Labels: animation, peter jackson, rumours, spielberg, tintin Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 20.5.07
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Trademark Infringiest Place on Earth
We are living in a golden age of intellectual property theft. But you have to hand it to people who can steal not just a piece of music, not just an unlicensed image of a character, not just a digital copy of a movie... but a whole amusement park. Yes, it's the unlicensed Chinese Disneyland. The park even has a song that rivals "It's a Small World" in the irritation stakes (and which far outdoes it in lyrical audacity): Although they could just be laughing their way to the bank. (Spotted at Cartoon Brew). Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 10.5.07 - 0 comments
Pulp Muppets
Exactly what it sounds like. hchvn wghhsdg dshfhsd dfhhdsf dsghh dfshh dghshgs dghshgs gdhsgh dghsgh gdhghs gdhsgh dghhdsg dghsgh dghsghsd dghsgh dhshsdg gdhsgsh gdhsgh ghdgshd dghssghd dfssdg gsgh. Also reminds you what an awesome trailer that film had. (Pointed out by Bevis). Labels: humour, muppets, tarantino Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 10.5.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, May 06, 2007
The Crudtastic Four
Before the disappointing Spider-man 3 there is a trailer for the next Fantastic Four movie: my possibly unfair assumption is that it will suck, which might burst the recent superhero revival bubble somewhat (although there is still the next Batman film to come). But it could be so much worse. For example, had you realised that in 1994, Roger Corman produced a version of The Fantastic Four? The rights to the series were contractually tied to the production of a movie by a certain date; if no movie was made, the producers' option would lapse. So a movie was produced, on an absolutely rock-bottom budget, with no intention of ever releasing it (at least not through conventional channels). And of course, it now circulates as a bootleg. Here's the trailer: And here's the ending. Spoiler and shonky rubber arm warnings apply: The funny thing is, the costume for the Thing is actually not so bad. Labels: corman, humour, superheroes, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 6.5.07 - 0 comments
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