Odds & Ends
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The Beowulf Express
A new trailer / preview reel for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf has hit the net. The best version is here, but there's a YouTube version below in case that's too much of a download. Unfortunately, though, the trailer is sufficiently dark and choppy that it looks pretty awful when it's been Youtube-ised. I'll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.) The films I'm thinking of are distinguished instead by their aspirations to harness realistic-looking performers to highly artificial environments. There are a whole lot of techno-geek directors who seem to have decided this is the way of the future: Zemeckis is one, but there's also James Cameron (with his uber-sci fi project Avatar), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), George Lucas (given how far the new Star Wars films went down this road), and Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg (with their upcoming Tintin movies, which I talked about here). As I said, I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at this Beowulf footage, and discounting the pointless pseudo-animation on the humans, you can see that there is enormous potential in this technology: it frees filmmaker form all sorts of logistical and technical shackles that go with traditional techniques. And we saw in Sin City that you could get a really distinctive look in this way. Yet so far for the most part what we are seeing is the aesthetics of computer games transferred to the cinema. The elimination (or minimisation) of sets means that we get the free-floating camera familiar to gamers. The fact that it's all put together in the computer, rather than having to work around the realities of celluloid and lenses and light, gives us the same cinematographic tics you get in games (bleach-bypassed looks like in 300, or other highly synthetic visual schemes). The bad animation in the Zemeckis films is reminiscent of game cutscenes. And when you add in all the other cliches of computer-effects (massive battle sequences, swarms of objects or creatures), you start to get a series of fairly indistinguishable looking films. I'm not such a luddite that I think the emergence of computer game aesthetics in cinema is an inherently bad thing. But what we're seeing at the moment is the influence of computer game cliches. Filmmakers are being granted enormous freedom, but having won that freedom they're all choosing to do the same thing. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.8.07 - 0 comments  
Monday, August 20, 2007
Remember MIFF? (MIFF Report, Part II)
Apologies for the delays in getting further posts on the Melbourne International Film Festival up. There was always going to be limited opportunity to post during the festival, since so many of the films I was seeing were in the last few days, but things were made worse by difficulties at my day job which caused a few planned films on my schedule to bite the dust. Hopefully my previous plugs for Paul Martin's Melbourne Film Blog led anybody who was hankering for day-by-day coverage there; the boys over at Hoopla also managed to cover a reasonable number of films. One of the films I missed (El Topo) remains very much on my list to cover on the site. What I did see was generally pretty good, and I had a better time of it than last year. So here are some quick thoughts on what I did end up seeing. Manufacturing Dissent: Michael Moore and the Media (Debbie Melnyk, Rick Caine) This anti-Michael Moore documentary would make a good primer for anyone who thought Michael Moore was an ethically uncompromised documentary maker... if, that is, there were any such people left. I'd have thought that the world long ago split into those who find Moore's documentaries to be hopelessly biased propaganda, and those (like myself) who find him a really interesting filmmaker but who despair at his occasional lapses of ethics and judgment. However, Canadian documentary maker Debbie Melnyck feigns ignorance of Moore's sometimes dubious methods to spin a tale of her growing disillusionment with him, adopting many of his most infamous methods - most particularly, unannounced doorstops - and turning them against him. The points the documentary makes are sometimes very telling, but the adoption of the worst aspects of Moore's style is a double-edged sword. Yes, it exposes Moore as a hypocrite, in that he can be made to look bad using the same methods he uses on others. Yet because Melnyck only manages to reproduce Moore's worst, without managing to match the incisiveness of Moore at his best, she comes off looking a far inferior filmmaker. Having revisited most of Bowling for Columbine on TV the other night, I was reminded again how much better Moore's best work is; seeing a film like this take such a naive approach to debunking him (by, for example, professing shock at the way in which the gun collection in Columbine was staged for the camera) didn't really shake my view of Moore in any meaningful way. Billy the Kid (Jennifer Vendetti) This low key documentary about a sweet but socially maladjusted teenager living in a small town in the US is very entertaining, but left me with mixed feelings. So much of a documentary comes down to choice of subject, and you can't dismiss the role ofa filmmaker in making their own luck and spotting the good subjects that exist in everyday life. Yet reviewing a slice-of-life film like this veers dangerously close to reviewing the people themselves, as the qualities that make Billy the Kid worth seeing really all relate to Billy himself. Billy is an awkward misfit, but obviously very bright, and his relationship with his mother is touching: you get the feeling Billy could have been really troubled if he hadn't had such a supportive parent. Indeed, the principle reservation I have about the film follows from the protectiveness it makes you feel towards Billy, as you start to resent the filmmaker's interventions in his life. For example, the film centres on Billy's crush on a sweet girl who works at the local diner, and as Billy makes his first moves on her you suddenly feel the heavy weight of manipulation by the director. Billy's first big moments with the subject of his crush are shot with such close cameras and heavy coverage that there is simply no way that the two teens could have had a natural discussion. It's difficult not to feel that the course of Billy's budding relationship was drastically affected by the filmmakers, who may have unwittingly put their own interests ahead of Billy's. Monkey Grip (Ken Cameron) It's not hard to see why Ken Cameron's adaptation of Helen Garner's semi-autobiographical novel died at the box office back in 1982. For starters, the subject matter - the soap opera-ish interpersonal shenanigans of a group of inner-Melbourne intelligentsia and bohemians - could hardly be better misjudged to alienate a middle-suburban audience. And there's something really frustrating in watching Noni Hazlehurt's Nora take so long to come to terms with a pretty fundamental relationship lesson: there's no future with a junkie. What's more, the storyline is jumbled, with peripheral characters (like Chrissie Amphlett's Angela) being dragged onto centre stage for big relationship crises despite having been only fleetingly established earlier in the film: it's as if Cameron and Garner have forgotten that we don't know these characters as well as they do. Hazlehurst puts in a brave performance, but is miscast. She's too sunny and squeaky clean for what seems to be intended as a troubled and sexually adventurous character, and so the film ends up with something of a blank at its centre. Yet for all that, the intervening years have made the film's virtues that much stronger: it works really well as a time capsule of a particular period, location, and intellectual clique. The songs by Amphlett and the Divinyls are now standards, and Ken Cameron's direction holds up really well, with a good feel for location and strong performances right through the cast. Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi) This oddball comedy from New Zealand seems sure to become a big cult item. It's a simple tale of the relationship between two misfits: the shy but sensitive Lily (Loren Horsley), and the self-centered ubernerd Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), who is training for his revenge on the bully bully from his high school. It's very funny and it's good to see an upcoming New Zealand director make a splash with his first feature. Yet, while I definitely recommend it when it gets its commercial release, it is also going to be hurt by one serious problem: Jarrod's sheer awfulness. Clement does great work in the role, creating an amusing and unique character - nerds in movies tend to be portrayed as lovable and misunderstood underdogs, so it's interesting to see a social misfit who is actually just a jerk - but you can never warm up to him. The little redemption he gets in the film is so little and so late that it simply can't justify the faith that Lily puts in him all through the film. Yet that gripe aside, this is still a lot of fun. Labels: documentaries, miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 20.8.07 - 2 comments
Monday, August 06, 2007
Stop Giggling, Zeffirelli
This says a lot about me: the deaths of Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman last week sent me scrambling for an episode of The Goodies. Specifically, I wanted to check if either had received a mention in Tim Brooke-Taylor's dressing down of the mid-seventies art-film industry in the episode "Movies," from 1975. Turned out neither had (I guess because they peaked earlier), but it's still a great clip: This speech, and the whole of this episode, comes across as expression of the team's frustration at the under-recognition of popular art such as their own in favour of "boring" and "pretentious" art movies. Having fired the art-film directors, the Goodies (Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, and Tim Brooke-Taylor) turn to making their own films, and the episode builds towards a remarkable eight-minute-long sequence in which each simultaneously tries to make their own genre film, only to have their competing genres - silent cinema, westerns, and Roman-era epic - declare war on each other. (I'd love to post it on YouTube, but that would be pushing fair use a bit far: you can find it on the second Goodies DVD compilation).  It's a sequence full of remarkably inventive gags, which pull together a lot of the kinds of medium-stretching jokes used by earlier popular filmmakers such as Buster Keaton, Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin. Bill Oddie, in an apparently black and white shot, runs to the right of screen, only to run (without a cut) into a colour set, revealing that he and the original set have actually been painted black and white. Graeme sits down to watch a film only to be chased out of the cinema by Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy lookalikes who emerge from the screen (actually two screens, because the film Graeme is watching is of a motion picture theatre, and the characters chase him from two screens deep in the film-within-a-film-within-a-film.) The trio do a flawless, and dangerous-looking, recreation of Buster Keaton's famous falling house gag from Steamboat Bill, Jr, after which Keaton steps onto screen to take notes. A truck emerges from a projected image and nearly kills Graeme; moments later, Graeme pulls a similar projected screen off the wall and tips the projected images of Tim and Bill out of the screen and into a heap on the floor. And so on. The team still seem proud of this sequence; when I saw Garden and Brooke-Taylor at a live show last year, it was the clip they chose to finish the night. It must have been extraordinarily challenging to put together, and is impressive both in concept and execution. (The editing is very sharp: the truck-out-of-the-screen gag, for example, reads much better than it should have because the truck's approach is preceded on the screen by a couple of seconds of countdown, to suggest the start of a reel of film). Yet The Goodies never received a great deal of critical recognition, and even in 1975 it must have been apparent that it was their contemporaries from Monty Python who would be remembered as the real comic innovators of their generation. So when the Goodies lash the pretentiousness of recognised art-film directors of the day, it's hard not to see a little frustration at the critical prejudices that left their own work so under-appreciated. I find all this really interesting because it relates to my own interests, which have probably become obvious to anyone who has read this page over the years. That is, I'm particularly interested in the merits of popular cinema, and the art that flies under the radar of critical recognition. It isn't that I'm anti-art cinema: while I could point to some classic examples of pretentious, largely meritless films that got a soft ride from critics (Last Year at Marienbad, I'm looking at you), I'm not one of those people who scoff at the notion of film as art. But I do find filmmakers who do really interesting things without overtly waving the art flag particularly rewarding, and admire those who can please a wide audience while still doing interesting things. These are the kinds of filmmakers that the Goodies acknowledge in "Movies:" people like silent comedians, makers of westerns, and cartoon filmmakers, who weren't usually taken terribly seriously as artists at the time they worked (Chaplin is an interesting exception in this regard). Great popular filmmakers like Keaton, Frank Tashlin, John Ford, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and so on suffered critically at the time they first made films by being on the wrong side of art vs commerce or high vs low dichotomies. Yet these kinds of artists have a massive reach and influence, and deserve greater recognition for doing quality work that also speaks to an audience. Such filmmakers are recognised now, of course. There tends to be a generational delay in the critical appreciation of really popular artists: when those who grew up with them join the ranks of the critical community, they prompt a reassessment. Hence you get Andrew Sarris' re-evaluations of people like John Ford and Howard Hawks starting the late 1960s, or the 1970s reevaluation of the Warner Bros cartoonists. As I've touched on before (here), this means that a key challenge for critics is to not get distracted by elitist, pre-conceived notions of quality, and to try to spot the really good stuff wherever it's occurring, without feeling sheepish about whether its respectable or not. That's a major part of why I find popular cinema so interesting to write about. Labels: commentary, criticism, goodies, snobbery Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 6.8.07 - 0 comments
|
This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia. Stan Winston and the Monsters that You Can See Hit and MIFF Because We All Remember How the Last Movie I Poste... Return of the Spielberg Guy Stills Avery, Jones, Clampett The Other Jones Iron Man 2: Early Review Location, Location, Location December 2003 May 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 Want to contact me? |