Odds & Ends
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Coolest Movie News Since.... Ever?
You've probably seen this already, since it's one of those rare pieces of news about film restoration that was so earth-shattering it made the mainstream media: a near-complete version of Metropolis has turned up. Ain't It Cool have images here.  I love Metropolis: I'm a fan of city movies, and silent movies, and big epic special effects movies, and science fiction movies, so it really does have everything for me. Everything except, of course, about a quarter of its footage: the previous best-available version used intertitles to give a sense of what was missing. That DVD was released by Kino overseas, and seems to be the basis of the version released by Madman in Australia. Kino were already planning a re-release (with a Blu-Ray version) in 2009; that has been hastily revised to include the rediscovered footage. Obviously the new footage is likely to be in poor shape, visually, but its historical importance is extraordinary. What could possibly be next: the ten hour version of Greed? Labels: commentary, rumours, silent film Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 5.7.08 - 0 comments  
Friday, June 27, 2008
Stan Winston and the Monsters that You Can See
While I was on holiday a couple of big names passed away. One was Cyd Charise, but I'd never try to pass myself off as qualified to write about her: I did enjoy Jaime Weinman's commentary though, with some great YouTube clips, here. Special effects artist Stan Winston, however, has his fingerprints all over the post-seventies Hollywood that I find so interesting. The market for special effects is so big now that nobody can really stamp their name on it the way old-school artists like Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen did, but Winston was as close as we had to that kind of iconic effects artist in the past few decades. He was also the last of a breed, in that he was a master of physical creature effects - achieved through make-up, puppetry, robotics, and the like - in an age where such creatures are increasingly being done by computer. His career paralleled another great effects artist, Rick Baker, but where Baker was probably best known for make-up effects (as with his work on all those films where Eddie Murphy plays multiple characters) and had a sideline in creature work, Winston's emphasis was the other way round.  Despite this "old-school" emphasis, Winston wasn't a luddite; his effects frequently (even usually) co-existed with other kinds of effects, and he was co-founder of the effects studio Digital Domain, which (as the name implies) specialised in digital work. Many of the works in his later filmography are textbook examples of the flawless integration of physical and digital effects: perhaps the best example is the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park, which seamlessly combines a digital T-Rex with physical effects by Winston. Such a combination works very well, because each technology does what it's best at. Generally speaking, physical effects can't make a full-bodied, non-humanoid creatures that can walk convincingly in a full frame shot (although there have been some heroic attempts, like the Landstriders in The Dark Crystal). Computer effects (and before that, stop-motion animation) are needed to get that sort of effect. What physical effects are good for are close-up partial body shots, and for getting some genuine interaction between the creature and actor. Physical effects tend to look more tangibly present in the same space as the actor for the simple reason that they actually are: a really exact match of lighting and cinematography can be achieved with CG effects (and again, the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park is a great example), but it's much harder. And physical effects certainly encourage performances that better "sell" the effects. As Steven Spielberg puts it in his tribute to Winston at Ain't It Cool: It's so much harder getting performances from actors when the principal nemeses are two grips holding 15-foot poles with Day Glo tape at different intervals. Joey Mazzello and Ariana Richards were crazy scared on JURASSIC PARK when Stan's T-Rex lowered his softball-sized eye right into the window of their Ford Explorer to scope them out. These moments were multiplied and divided amongst the cast, who had to act with a life-sized Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, Dilophosaurus, and two Velociraptors, that could even fog up a window with one powerful snort.Such praise of physical effects might seem a little ironic coming from Spielberg right after the CG-fest of Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it's a common sentiment at the moment. The proliferation of badly done computer effects has led to something of a backlash against them that's very noticeable in reviews (and again, the new Indiana Jones has become something of a lightning rod for this kind of comment). This is just because there's so many such effects shots being done on tight (read: rushed) schedules, and because too many films rely on CG imagery alone. When only one technique is used, the audiences' eye starts to pick the illusion: if it's all physical (not a common option at the moment) then they are likely to become aware of the stiffness of the creature, or the fact that its whole body is never shown. With CG they are likely to start to register subtle problems with lighting and texture, which give that almost subconscious sense that the creature isn't really "there." Blending effects can hopefully achieve the best of both worlds, which is why Winston's comfort with working across methods was so crucial. Indeed, Winston's best work defied the old maxim that a monster in a movie should be shown as little as possible: the "it's scarier if you don't see it" fallacy. I still see this idea thoughtlessly bandied around, but when applied as a broad maxim it's nonsense. It had some truth when monsters in movies were men with rubber heads and became laughable the moment they were revealed; and showing a creature only fleetingly, or holding it until the end, continues to be an option to help avoid the illusion "breaking." There are also all sorts of suspense effects that happen to rely on not showing the monster, such as POV shots from the monster's perspective, or shots where the monster is obscured and happens to leap into frame to cause a scare. However, these quite specific pragmatic and stylistic reasons for limiting the exposure of your creature should not be mistaken for, or extrapolated into, a broader model of screen suspense. There are all sorts of people and creatures and we see in movies that we are scared of, and they aren't all lurking outside of, or at the edges of, the frame. Indeed, at some point, an off-screen menace will surely become an intangible menace, and there will be no substitute for your monster appearing on-screen and chewing someone's head off. That's putting it flippantly, but the point needs to be made. If the effects are good enough, there is absolutely no reason you can't show your creature if the context calls for it. Winston was one of those exceptional artists who demonstrated this, by giving top directors such as John McTiernan, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg creatures they could craft suspense sequences around, and feature squarely on-screen when necessary. Proponents of the "hidden = scary" model decry such front-and-centre effects as lacking in in imagination and technique, but this is over-simplistic. A really good director will use all sorts of methods to induce suspense, and being able to show the monster just increases the directors options. Look through Winston's filmography and you'll see many particularly remarkable creature effects. Some highpoints:  The Terminator (1984) Winston provided the physical terminator puppet / robot, alternated with a stop-motion version in the climactic scenes. This was the film that brought him to wide attention, and marked the start of his extended collaboration with James Cameron. While far from his most "flawless" work, it's impressive for what he did on a low budget (he would get to revisit and perfect it for Terminator 2: Judgement Day.) Predator (1987) Winston did the very impressive alien creature at the end of this movie: if we don't count the varied creatures of the Alien series (see below) this might be the most effective "man in a suit with a mask" monster ever done. Edward Scissorhands (1990) An example of Winston's versatility: Winston led the combination of animatronics and make-up work to realise the title character. Jurassic Park (1993) Winston produced a lot of robotic dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, and, as already noted, its best sequences are a highpoint for on-screen realism and combination of robotics with CG. The T-Rex sequence is also notable for the particular challenge the sheer size of the creature created: the robotic Rex was mounted on a platform designed for commercial flight simulators. A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001) That adorable yet kind-of-creepy teddy bear was Winston's. A good example of a special effects creature that is a character in the film, rather than simply a monster. For me though the highpoint of Winston's career is undoubtedly:  Aliens (1986) This is really the pinnacle of an old way of doing monster movies. Winston built on the work of others (notably Carlo Rambaldi) from the first film, but he had to show much more: James Cameron featured hordes of aliens, doing lots of different things. These were achieved almost entirely with physical effects: there's little if any animation, and CG as we now know it wasn't around yet. What's more, he had to deliver a large alien queen that could remain convincing for a sustained fight at the film's climax. This is the kind of creature nobody would dream of doing without CG these days, but the sequence remains both absolutely gripping and completely plausible. In particular, note how fast the alien queen is: not an easy thing in physical effects when the creature is so large. But it greatly increases her menace. (There are some nice tributes to Winston from colleagues, including James Cameron, over at Ain't It Cool, here). Labels: commentary, special effects, spielberg, stan winston Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 27.6.08 - 1 comments
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Because We All Remember How the Last Movie I Posted the Trailer For Turned Out
Baz Luhrmann's Australia hadn't really been on my radar, despite its profile. I think it was partly the stink of self-indulgence that hung over the project, as well as my increasing reservations about Lurhmann's style. I enjoyed Strictly Ballroom without loving it, and Romeo + Juliet really impressed me, but by the time of Moulin Rouge I thought Luhrmann's self-conscious technique had become a liability. However, the appearance of the first trailer on the internet has put this right at the top of my list. Luhrmann - as best as we can tell - appears to have limited his stylised approach to the framing story and gone for a more old-school epic style of shooting for the rest of the film. I realise a trailer can make anything look good, but damn: this movie looks absolutely gorgeous. We never really have had a really good Australian western, despite a few attempts and the fact that the genre is so suited to being trasnposed here (it isn't cool to say this, but Man From Snowy River probably got closest). Luhrmann just might have cracked it. For the full, high-def experience (very much the preferred option) click here, but if you can't do that, a YouTube version is below. Labels: australia, commentary, luhrmann, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.6.08 - 3 comments
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Stills
Apologies for the absence of material for the website lately; apart from the usual non-filmy stuff, I've been working on an article / review for Senses of Cinema which has kept me occupied. Hence the cluster of "Odds and Ends" items today as I post a few tidbits I hadn't had time to address. One thing I wanted to point out, for the academicy / bloggery type people who read this site, is this article by Kristin Thompson that reaffirms her longstanding argument in favour of the legality of using film stills - rather than publicity stills - in support of film criticism. I've relied on her reasoning for a long time, and it still seems sound to me. I just point this out because I still see a lot of books and websites still illustrated primarily with publicity stills (indeed, both the books I talked about in my SOS article rely largely on such stills). I've never had any interest in using such stills: I'd rather rely on images that actually come from the movie itself to illustrate my points. For popular review type websites, use of publicity stills is usually harmless enough, but in the case of academic books, it's another subtle factor that seems to encourage authors not to worry about close analysis of what is actually on screen (the primary factor in this remains laziness). So I just thought that Thompson's article was worth a nod. Vive La Film Still! Labels: close analysis, commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.5.08 - 0 comments
Iron Man 2: Early Review
I saw Iron Man the other day. I enjoyed it, but don't have enough to say about it to warrant a full review. Suffice to say it reminded me a lot of the first Spider-man film; well-written, with good characters and performances and a healthy sense of conviction in the exercise by all involved, but at the same time lacking the really big show-stopping scenes that would have made it more memorable (the climax is really just two guys in metal suits punching each other.) It made me think of these comments by Paul Rameker in an article I've linked to before, over at David Bordwell's page:
I would second all that and also add that these days, the sequel will get more money spent on it than the original; this and the more straightforward stories allowed once the "origin" story is out of the way means the second film in a series can usually be more action-focused. (Yes, this is a good thing.) The old idea that sequels gradually fade away in terms of quality should be considered completely dead, at least as far as first sequels go; third films in series remain much dodgier propositions. Another example: the Bourne series, which - whatever you think of it's hyperkinetic style - really only emerged as the default reference points for action filmmaking when the sequels appeared. Thus I'm excited about Iron Man 2 (Iron Men?), assuming the first film does well enough to warrant a sequel, and that they can keep Robert Downey Jr interested and out of jail. I fully expect to better than Iron Man, just as I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight (despite not being amongst those who consider Batman Begins a gold standard for comic book blockbusters) and Quantum of Solace (which is very much a first sequel in the reborn Bond series that began with Casino Royale). Speaking of which, here's the new trailer for The Dark Knight, featuring lots of the late Heath Ledger. His performance looks incredible, and surely show-offy enough to get a posthumous supporting actor Oscar. Labels: batman, bordwell, commentary, sequels, snobbery, superheroes, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.5.08 - 2 comments
Friday, April 04, 2008
Location, Location, Location
I still don't see enough discussion of the importance of location in film. It's not that it doesn't get discussed at all; I've seen a fair few academic books and articles over the years that touch on it, and the recent upsurge of interest in the depiction of cities in film (which leads to books like Celluloid Skyline  When I think about my favourite movies, one thing that strikes me is how many of them create a vivid sense of place; I love films that make me feel like I've visited somewhere. That isn't just for obvious epic style movies in exotic locales, like a Lawrence of Arabia; I'm thinking about movies in all sorts of genres, and all sorts of types of locations. So it might be the L.A. suburbs of E.T., or the New England town of Jaws, or Woody Allen's idealised New York in Manhattan, or the frontier backwoods of McCabe and Mrs Miller, or even the fantasy environments of the original Star Wars. One of the key things that separates these films from their less successful imitators is the sense of immersion in those places that they offer. I suppose I'm temperamentally inclined to fixate on place: I work as an urban planner, so I take some of that preoccupation with how we're affected by our physical surroundings into the cinema with me. But I think there's also something fundamental at work here too. I'm hardly alone in observing that films are often about escapism: not just in the shallow Hollywood sense, but in the sense that movies of all kinds seek to take us out of our current state-of-mind and immerse us in their own particular world. When this kind of psychic transportation is successful, the sense of having visited a place can be palpable. That feeling, for me, is a sure sign that a film has worked well. One of the tricky things about discussing this idea of place in movies is that it's hard to separate two different ideas: the role of location as an element in the filmmakers' toolkit, and location as an aesthetic result of the filmmaking process.  What I mean by the former point is that location becomes one of the ingredients available to filmmakers, like casting, musical score, cinematography, editing, and the framing and composition of shots. Traditionally, the setting of a film is just one of many ingredients lumped under the vague and broad term mise-en-scene, but I would argue it needs to be pulled out of that catch-all term and given more attention as a discrete consideration. An attentive filmmaker will think about the way location informs character, mood, style, and theme. When Rocky walks through the run-down streets of Philadelphia in the early part of the first movie in the series, the director communicates lots of things: we learn things about Rocky by observing both his background and mindset, and at the same time, we feel a general sense of melancholy because of the ugliness of the urban locations. That grittiness, in turn, helps place the film within a more realist mode of filmmaking than earlier genre pictures, and the groundwork is being laid for the film's theme that great things can be achieved by people from the seemingly most unlikely locations. Character, mood, style, theme. So location becomes a big part of the directors' toolkit. Indeed, in some cases location is a key to a genre: the western, film noir and road movie genres, for example, are defined largely by their particular types of locations.  So location is an ingredient in filmmaking, but it can also be an output of the other ingredients of cinema. That "strong sense of location" I covet in a movie isn't just a result of choosing an appropriate setting for the movie (although that will be part of it). Most other aspects of a film inform the locations presence in the final film. For example, a widescreen format can give an expansive, epic view of locations as in Lawrence of Arabia, whereas a narrower format might give a more intimate feel. The blocking of shots, placement of cameras, camera movement, composition of the frame, and editing patterns all effect the way in which the audience understands the film's geography. As very rough rule, longer, steadier, and more generously framed shots give the audience more chance to take in the environment: think of the long, contemplative shots of rural Texas in No Country for Old Men. At the same time, though, limitation of our views of a setting can shape how it is perceived, as when a fairly nondescript woods and empty house are made threatening through limitation of our views of them in The Blair Witch Project. Cinematography and lighting can be crucial to defining location: think of the crisp but moody black-and-white Paris of Rififi, or the hazy, nostalgic look of the old west in McCabe and Mrs Miller. Casting plays a part: the town in Jaws feels more real because various locals are pressed into service in supporting roles, and the New York of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver is defined in part by the company of actors Scorsese uses. Production design and special effects can create rich but essentially fictional environments, as in Metropolis or Blade Runner. Even aural cues, especially music, can be crucial: think of the way Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" defines Woody Allen's Manhattan, or Mark Knopfler's score the Scotland of Local Hero, or Ennio Morricone's music the mythic frontier of Once Upon a Time in the West. In all these examples, location becomes an output of the combination other cinematic devices.Longtime readers - should I have any - might have noticed me touch on these kind of issues before, and I don't claim some unique sensitivity to the issue. But it is an interesting issue to bring to the foreground, rather than simply noting in passing as most writers on film (including myself) traditionally have; I'm just embarking on a university research project that will be looking a lot at these kinds of issues, so I expect it will be a little more front-and-centre on this page in coming months. For now, I'll just allude to some of the different angles we can take on locations, beyond the "location as input" and "location as output" schematic I've just outlined. Faces as Location I mention above the way characters can help define a place in a movie, but for a really pure, extreme example, what about simple, unadorned use of faces as landscape? I'm thinking of the famous opening shot of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly where we have a long shot of a desert enviornment, only to have an actor's head suddenly intrude, turning the extreme long shot into an extreme close-up. Thinking about this in terms of our sense of location, the relatively generic landscape shot doesn't tell us much: it's not even clearly a western location. The face, however, does a great deal to plant us clearly within Leone's universe. There's the cowboy hat, for a start, but more important is how grubby and dishevelled the actor is. These pieces of information taken together immediately reshape the landscape from one that is not even unmistakeably western, to one that is distinctly of Leone's west.   Location as Homage The Leone reference brings up the idea of location as reference or homage to previous filmmakers. The most famous example is Monument Valley, in Utah, which became inextricably linked to the works of John Ford, notably through its use in Stagecoach and The Searchers. Sergio Leone made a point of traveling to America specifically to film a handful of shots in the valley for Once Upon a Time in the West, and since then the location has become such a visual cliche it can really only be used when the purpose is tongue-in-cheek (as in Back to the Future Part III).  Such use of locations in order to inherent accumulated audience goodwill might seem like it would only capture the attention of movie buffs, but think of what a difference continuity of location in a movie series can make. A big reason Jaws 2 seems so much more legitimate a sequel than the subsequent Jaws 3 is because the latter didn't use the original's Martha's Vineyard locations, but the former did. Even when everything else is subpar, as in the second Jaws film, the judicious use of locations can give a cosy familiarity. Absence of Location What do we lose when we remove real locations from films? There are all sorts of examples where absence of location can drastically shape a film or even whole movements in cinema. Animated films have to do without real locations, and it's a loss of fidelity that the medium feels keenly and has to compensate for. Similarly, the technicalities of on-site shooting limited the availability of real locations in both the early silent period, and from the thirties well into the sixties. The stylistic impacts (both positive and negative) of the tendency to shoot films on soundstages in those decades is enormous; similarly various film movements (notably the Italian Neo-realism, the French New Wave, and the New Hollywood of the seventies) made a distinct virtue out of their embrace of real locations. And now, since the 90s, we have seen the re-emergence of a "locationless" aesthetic, with films shot largely or entirely in front of greenscreens (a la the Star Wars prequels, or Sin City) or even in entirely virtual worlds (The Polar Express, Beowulf). Like many others, I feel that films lose something from this lack of location; there is a dislocation and unreality similar to that found when watching old movies with phony rear projection. These films give an example of the importance of location; consider how much more real than the prequel's Star Wars universe the world of the Lord of the Rings seems, largely because Peter Jackson generally used augmented real locations rather than wholly fake ones (as Lucas often did). A sense of location is important even in fantasy films; and when a film can lend its invented world a sense of location that approaches that of films set in our world, the effect can be very powerful indeed. Location as Documentary As well as film's role in contriving non-real locations, film also plays a role in documenting the real. As we approach a centenary of cinema, our films become more and more a depository of information about the environments in which they were shot. We can appreciate this most readily with our oldest films, which are now being mined as a visual record of what life was like in the early twentieth century. For example, I've written before about John Bengston's book Silent Echoes, which pores over the films of Buster Keaton to find the real locations where they were shot. Because that was generally in and around Los Angeles, that allows Bengston to catalogue the changes that have occurred to the city. The location shots in Keaton's films become a fascinating document of a by-gone Los Angeles that you would scarcely believe could have existed visiting it now. Dziga Vertov's innovative "day in the life" film Man With a Movie Camera is similarly invaluable as a record of Soviet life in the 1920s, despite its often abstract style. Films as Place-builders Just as films can preserve for posterity places that no longer exist, they can also influence and change real places. New York – along with other great and much-filmed cities, like Paris and Rome - owes much of its identity to its portrayal in the movies. New York has been the definitive movie metropolis through the twentieth century, and its shifting fortunes as a city have been not only reflected but also shaped by its depiction in the movies. If you go to New York the sensation of being inside a giant movie set is uncanny; our understanding of New York as a place is essentially inseparable from its cultural role in countless movies and TV shows. The scary reality is that we learn a lot about the world around us through movies, and over time this actually becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Films make use of real locations; we then reconstruct those places as imagined locations in our heads; which alters the way that we perceive those real locations; which actually effects the real locations (by making them seem glamorous and attracting more residents, for example); which in turn feeds back into the movies (so New York is used in films because of the iconic status that films themselves helped to build). Nobody can measure the effect of Manhattan and Friends and Seinfeld and their many predecessors on real estate prices in Manhattan, but there can be no doubt that there is a very tangible impact from the way our culture makes us think about the place.  Locations as Tourist Destinations In New York that "inside-a-movie" feeling comes from the overlaying of countless film depictions, as well as the heightened stimulation provided by such a bustling metropolis. Yet fans also seek out locations because they associate them with individual films. This has most famously been seen with the phenomena of Middle Earth tourism in New Zealand, but Tony Reeves' classic guide for location stalkers, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations  , is now up to its third edition, giving some sense of the wider interest in seeking out familiar movie locations. When I was in the US a couple of years ago, Reeves' book helped me locate the precise locations for various scenes in Jaws, and it truly is uncanny to stand in what had previously been only an imagined environment.Will Brooker, writing in The Blade Runner Experience about the attempts of Blade Runner fans to visit the real places used as the basis for the future L.A., notes that when you get to a real environment and it doesn't match the fictional one, it is the real that feels wrong. That was my experience. While I'm not naive about how films are made, and obviously knew that film spaces are pieced together from lots of different locations, I still found that the geography of Amity that Spielberg constructed in Jaws was so persuasive that it was distracting when I stood in the real location and it didn't match the film version. So, while it was a thrill to stand on the same breakwater down which Brody ran in the fourth of July sequence, it was also a bit unsettling to find that the estuary depicted wasn't just next to the town's main beach as it had been in the film.   The point is, though, I sought the locations out. And standing in the main street of Edgartown, Massachussets, it felt uncannily like I was I was in the fictional township of Amity. It felt right, it felt real, but of course the comparison I was drawing was with something that never existed outside of my head. That the fictional version could be so persuasive says a lot about the power of place in the movies. Labels: close analysis, commentary, location, peter jackson, spielberg Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 4.4.08 - 0 comments
Monday, October 29, 2007
Close and Choppy
One of the best people writing about film is David Bordwell, author of the textbook Film Art, a staple of university film courses. I've just started reading his book The Way Hollywood Tells It (and should talk about it on the site when I'm done), and have finally added his site to Cinephobia's link page. It's great to be able to read his writing for free, on a regular basis, and I've plugged one of his articles here before. Slightly belatedly, I thought it was also worth pointing out his article on shaky camera / fast cut filmmaking, which focuses on Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum. The Bourne flick is long gone from cinemas, but the discussion of this style of direction should be with us for years: how many reviews of modern action films have you seen that complain about this way of shooting? (Certainly all mine do). What's notable about Bordwell's article is that he pushes the discussion well beyond the usual grizzling about this style of shooting and analyses in detail what is going on. As he points out, it's more than just the length of shots and the shakiness of the camera at work: it's also about how shots are framed, the proximity of the camera to its subject, the way the camera focusses (and pulls focus), and the placement of cuts (as opposed to simply the length of the shots between the cuts). All this is done in some detail with very clear frame captures from the Bourne film as examples. Bordwell also expands upon the usual discussion of this style in his discussion of why these things are done. Usually critics lapse into grumpy complaints about ever-shortening post-MTV attention spans at this point, but Bordwell talks about the narrative purposes such a style serves; it raises energy levels, yes, but it also helps conceal mistakes and downplay the over-the-top-ness of some of the action. I think Bordwell's spot on, but would point out one other thing that is sort of implicit in his article, but isn't spelt out: it's also cheaper to mount an action sequence this way. Pushing the camera back for distant and long-held master shots is expensive. In a car chase sequence, for example, if you pull the camera back for a master shot that shows all the cars speeding down the road, you have a massive logistical exercise in closing off huge sections of road, communicating with all your stunt-drivers, co-ordinating foreground and background action, and so on. All other things being equal, it is likely to become drastically more expensive both the further out the shot is from the action (because there's a greater area in view that needs to be cordoned off and under the control of the production) and the longer the shot (because the shot is open to more scrutiny, and because moving vehicles will cover a greater area). This is best illustrated with a couple of examples, which I'll take from two of my favorite 1980s action sequences: the final chase in George Miller's Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) and Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Despite Miller, in particular, having a reputation as a highly kinetic filmmaker, both have very similar approaches that emphasise long master shots. This is one of the opening shots from the Mad Max 2 chase:  That frame is near the start of the shot: the camera actually flies over the whole convoy of vehicles. Just to underline the point, here's a really extreme example, with another dramatic re-establishing shot mid-sequence:  Spielberg doesn't use a helicopter for his establishing shot, but adds the complication of foreground action in this pan that sets up his big action sequence:    All three shots are very effective in laying out the challenge before the hero (the hordes chasing Max, and the number of Nazis Indiana Jones will have to overwhelm). But they would have taken a long time to set up, and shots of that sort of complexity would have been all but impossible in a built-up city environment, where they would require the filmmakers to commandeer whole sections of city for extended periods. (Computer effects change the equation somewhat, by allowing these wide master shots to be done in a computer, but the fundamental point is the same. They just then become very expensive CG shots rather than very expensive "real" shots. Really ambitious computerised master shots also struggle to hold up to audience scrutiny: think of some of the cartoony CG in the freeway sequence of Live Free and Die Hard / Die Hard 4.0). So while I don't suggest this is a primary reason that Greengrass shoots the Bourne movies this way, it would be a factor: it is simply much more feasible to set an action sequence in urban locations if you shoot it close and choppy. This was always the case, of course, so I don't suggest that's the only or even the main reason people employ this style. But it's another to add to those Bordwell cites. As is probably obvious, I've got a fondness for directors that shoot in this manner: I think action sequences are vastly more exciting when the audience is clearly oriented, and there's a real beauty to the way directors like Miller and Spielberg cut their sequences together. (I've made this point about Spielberg before, here). Fortunately, it would be wrong to suggest that this style is dying out. Spielberg recently affirmed his commitment to this way of shooting for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull, with Ain't It Cool reporting as follows from a set visit: On the style: It hasn't been shot and it won't be edited like a modern action film. "I'm not going to change my style." [Spielberg] said he likes to give audiences a master shot and let them become the editors and decide which of the 8 characters on the screen they're going to look at. He jabbed at MTV type editing and said this will feel completely within the established INDIANA JONES world.But it's not just the old guard like Spielberg who fight the good fight against the shaky-cam brigade; there are still other directors around who shoot and edit for clarity. If you look at the freeway chase in Matrix Reloaded, you'll see that the Wachowski brothers favour a lot of wide master-shots that clearly orient the different parties in their chase in a manner very similar to the style of Miller and Spielberg. The shots below aren't the same kind of sequence-establishing shots that I've picked out above, but they still show the preference for pulling the camera back (sometimes to extreme locations, such as directly above the action) and clearly arranging the protagonists within the frame:    The Wachowskis even employ a shot I always associate with Miller, to the point I have previously nicknamed it the "Miller pan:" a low reverse-tracking shot in which a car sweeps across the frame to reveal the pursuing car behind. This one's better illustrated with an image: Miller's original Mad Max is at left, and the Wachowski's Matrix Reloaded is at right:  The Wachowski sequence is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Wachowski brothers were able to shoot this way because they built, at incredible expense, their own freeway to shoot on. By getting off real urban roads they bought themselves the freedom to shoot the sequence in this way (which Miller and Spielberg got from filming in remote desert locations). This reinforces some of what I have said about the cost of shooting such a sequence: it takes a mega-budget Matrix sequel to afford it. The other point is that the Wachowski's liking for these wide mastershots dovetails with their fondness for what might be called key shots: really striking, carefully composed shots in which the action is often (though not always) dramatically slowed to "hold" the shot for a few moments. This shifting from the ceaseless flow of images to the picking out of particular key compositions doubtless reflects the Wachowski's interest in comic books, which are basically a procession of such frames. These shots serve all sorts of other artistic purposes, but in this context it is of note that these key shots are almost always master shots that allow us to reposition all the players in space. That the comic book influence actually helps restore some clarity and order to the way films are shot is faintly ironic; the comic-book influence on cinema is probably even more derided than that of MTV editing. And perhaps both are blights on the art; but in this case at least, the two scourges are actually working against each other. Labels: close analysis, commentary, indiana jones, miller, snobbery, spielberg Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 29.10.07 - 1 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
Sunday, June 03, 2007
RIP HD-DVD; We Hardly Knew You
I'm a long way off making the leap to a high definition DVD format, but I've been watching the format war between the two rival formats (Blu Ray and HD-DVD) with some interest. It has seemed obvious to me for some time that Blu-Ray would be the last format standing; once all but one major studio was releasing disks in the format (while several don't release disks on HD-DVD) it seemed inevitable to me. I'm not the only one who felt this way: JB Hi-Fi, for example, aren't stocking HD-DVD titles at all on the basis that they see the death of the format as pretty much a foregone conclusion. Yet the hub of DVD news on the internet, The Digital Bits, has generally held back from saying this in quite such strong language. Now, though, prompted by some idiotic comments by Harry Knowles over at Ain't It Cool endorsing HD-DVD, they've come out and said what was becoming increasingly obvious, in a clear, well-reasoned piece (here). If you're thinking of trying out this whole high definition DVD thing and are wondering about the two formats, I strongly suggest you read it. Some samples: HD-DVD is not going to win this format war. In fact, one of two things is possible right now: Either Blu-ray will win, or neither format will win. But the best HD-DVD can hope for is to just keep hanging in the game as long as possible. If Harry Knowles' original comments were a paid endorsement by HD-DVD as many of his commenters suggested, then it seems to have backfired. Labels: commentary, dvd, hd-dvd Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 3.6.07 - 2 comments
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, April 28, 2007
All "Bodyguard," All the Time
A colleague alerted me to this interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) that looks at a bunch of boffins who think they've come up with a mathematical means of identifying hit movies. It contrasts their belief that there are rules that can identify potential hit movies with William Goldman's famous dictum that "nobody knows anything," and suggests there are two basic approaches to the idea of "rules" in art: What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one's own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. "Beauty is no quality in things themselves," the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. "It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything. I'm inclined to think that Gladwell's boffins are barking up the wrong tree, with way too many variables in their system to ever allow reliable calculations. Gladwell starts by talking about music, an area where it seems more persuasive that their approach might work: I can see how there might be particular patterns of beat or melody that just "sound right," and which could be mathematically described. For example, Gladwell mentions that Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" scored super-high on their scoring system, and this seems plausible: if ever there was a song that sounds like it would max out a computer's hit-single algorithm, it's that one. But I just don't think it could ever work for movies, and Gladwell's rather vague description of the buffs' trial run of the system does nothing to change my view. Gladwell makes it sound impressive, talking of the application of the system (called Epagogix) to nine unreleased movies: On three of the films - two of which were low-budget - the Epagogix estimates were way off. On the remaining six - including two of the studio's biggest-budget productions - they correctly identified whether the film would make or lose money. On one film, the studio thought it had a picture that would make a good deal more than $100 million. Epagogix said $49 million. The movie made less than $40 million. On another, a big-budget picture, the team's estimate came within $1.2 million of the final gross. On a number of films, they were surprisingly close. "They were basically within a few million," a senior executive at the studio said. "It was shocking. It was kind of weird." Gladwell puts a reasonably positive spin on this, in the circumstances, but break this down and what do we have? A third were off completely. Of the remaining six, we're told it only predicted whether the film made or lost money: but that allows a huge spread in terms of what counts as a successful prediction. (If a $100 million movie is predicted by Epagogix to make $250 million but actually makes $110 million, then the system can still be said to have correctly predicted it would break even). We have one out of the nine that we know the system got within $1.2 million, which is very close, but hardly compelling with eight other guesses that were obviously further off. Even for the film correctly predicted to underperform, Epagogix was still more than 20% off. So I'm a sceptic about the ability to predict the gross of movies. But I'm not having a go at Gladwell, who it eventually becomes clear has much the same reservations as I do about the system. And I think that the idea that art is designed by rules that can be objectively analysed is true to a point. It should be noted that Gladwell conflates Goldman's dictum, which is about predicting success, with the Hume / Kames debate, which is much more about formal aesthetic principles that underly art. There is some degree of overlap between a discussion about what is good and what will make money, but there's also a a fair bit of difference too, and that difference is crucial. Predicting the latter involves, effectively, mastering an incredibly complex system of multiple variables (relating to both the qualities of artwork itself and the response of the wider population) and the even more impossible task of factoring in essentially random outside stimulus. How, for example, can a computer program intuit that its values for Tom Cruise's box-office value are worthless because he jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch? Yet describing the formal properties that make a piece of art good is a much more respectable exercise. We don't baulk at all at the idea that there are formal principles that matter in visual arts like painting, photography, or architecture. We can instantly tell the difference between a well-composed image and a badly composed one, and some very simple principles (like the rule of thirds) can be persuasively demonstrated. And there are any number of similar rules of thumb for extended narrative forms such as the cinema: that a story should build to a climax, for example, or that the lead character should be taught a lesson during the course of the plot. These basic principles are so ingrained we generally don't even think about them. What is much more difficult, though, is in describing that extra something that makes a film great. You can tick all the boxes of the formulae that are taught in screenwriting manuals, and what you'll get will be servicable, but it tends to be the intangibles that make for real greatness. This might be particular actors, sparkling dialogue, aspects of the directors technique, the innovative departure from the usual narrative rules, or something even more indefinable. A careful analysis of a completed film should be able to tease out both the formal elements that work, and also the more unpredictable elements that lifted it above the mundane. But before it's made, you have only the formal stuff - that the plot is well constructed, say, or that the protagonist has a clear motivation - and that isn't enough to tell whether the final product has that extra something. Which might be the problem with the Epagogix exercise: only mediocrity can be scientifically described. This comes out in grimly humorous latter part of Gladwell's article, in which the boffins give their suggestions for improving Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter: essentially they decide that to maximise profits the film should be turned into The Bodyguard, a conclusion that upsets even those who devised the system. It's a point that reminds me of Roald Dahl's story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator," which contemplates a machine that generates short stories and novels according to mathematical principles. In Dahl's vision, the hand-crafted stories of human authors can't compete with the mass-produced versions, and gradually authors sign contracts to turn their own names over to a literary agency for use on machine-made stories. So we should probably hope that the Epagogix formula never really takes off. Certainly the prospect of studios lured to the sure cash of endless machine-tweaked Bodyguard clones brings to mind the final refrain of Dahl's story, as the author tries to summon up the courage to not pursue profitable option: "Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve." Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 28.4.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Here, Under Protest, is "Beef Burgers"
Now here's an oddity. For years a bootleg audio-tape has circulated of Orson Welles berating the directors of an advertisement for frozen peas, complaining about the script and the quality of their direction. It was a strange little curio, mentioned in David Thomson's Welles biography Rosebud, and one of those little pop-culture artifacts with its own tiny infamy - witness the existence of its own Wikipedia article. (Just thinking about it now, I wonder if it wasn't also the inspiration for the routine in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's Michael Dorsey complains about the script for an ad in which he played a tomato.) Anyway, that bootleg was the inspiration for a sequence in the nineties TV cartoon Pinky and the Brain where a slightly cleaned-up version of the dialogue was performed by the mice. (Maurice La Marche, who voiced the Brain, is known for his Welles impression: he overdubbed Vincent D'Onofrio as Welles in Tim Burton's Ed Wood). And now someone has gone and reunited the original Welles audio with the Pinky and the Brain animation. The result is, well, an even stranger little pop culture oddity. (This was brought to my attention, as so many of these kind of things are, by Jaime J. Weinman over at Something Old, Nothing New). Incidentally, I asked over at the the original post what The Brain had said instead of "I'll go down on you," and apparently it was "I'll make cheese for you." Which is a fortuitous substitution, as it preserves the lip-synch. If nothing else, the existence of the original Pinky and The Brain animation is a testament to the strange kinds of things that get slipped on to kids television when nobody at head office is paying attention. What on earth did the 99% of people who'd never heard of the "Frozen Peas" tape make of this? Labels: animation, commentary, humour Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.4.07 - 1 comments
Sunday, April 01, 2007
April Fools Day Declared Redundant: Real Movie News is Too Strange
For years I've had the same gripe with the news media's fondness for April Fool's Day stories: there are too many true stories floating around that strain belief as it is. When real life has become completely absurd, how are we to spot the jokes? This is doubly so in the world of online movie rumour reporting, where a) Hollywood is particularly crazy; and b) so many of the stories run as genuine aren't true anyway. A case in point: Ain't It Cool is running a story today that Pixar has picked up the rights to the cult property John Carter of Mars, and that the great Brad Bird (currently finishing Ratatouille) will direct. In live-action. With Pixar acting as an effects house, rather than an animation studio. I immediately assumed that it's a practical joke, and I'm still inclined to think so (particularly when the source blog's reputed transition to official Disney mouthpiece also happened on April 1). But the fine, upstanding journalists of Ain't It Cool have made it clear (here) that they have run it believing it to be genuine. Whichever way it goes (and again, I'm pretty sure it's bogus) it kind of bears out my reservations about April Fool's Day. Update: Confirmed bogus, by the source himself, in the comments. Labels: commentary, rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 1.4.07 - 2 comments
Friday, February 23, 2007
"We'll Invade Your Countries, Kill Your Leaders, and Convert You to Christianity."
In my post on torture in 24 - which was really just a link to someone else who wrote something interesting on the topic - I touched on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, the conservative response to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Well, John Rogers' blog has drawn my attention to a couple of clips from the show. First, Roger's opinion (as a former stand-up and comedy writer): It's as if aliens tried to decipher humor from radiated cable television waves and then constructed a "comedy" show with a poor translation algorithm. It is un-joke. You could put it in a chamber with a knock-knock joke and use the resultant explosion to power a starship. And now, in case you think that this is just because Rogers is some kind of leftie scrooge like myself, here are the clips Rogers highlighted so that you can judge for yourself. Personally, I think the conservatives should stick to the hard-hitting drama they are so good at and leave the funny to Stewart and the other lefties. But perhaps all that Marxism has gone to my head. Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 23.2.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, February 18, 2007
"Torture is a Dramatic Device."
A while back I wrote a couple of short pieces (such as this one) for the site arguing that Hollywood, for the most part, has showed a surprising reluctance to respond to the events of 9/11 by indulging in paranoid right-wing fantasies. While I stand by most of what I said then, I did forget the obvious counter-example: television's 24. My correction is prompted by an article written by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker that looks in some detail at the show's enthusiastic endorsement of the torture of terror suspects. It's a fascinating article, noting that the show's gung-ho depiction of torture has even led to the US Army sending Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to visit the show's producers to tell them to cut it out, on the grounds that it is giving young soldiers the wrong idea: Finnegan told the producers that 24, by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country's image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors - cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by 24, which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, "The kids see it, and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' " He continued, "The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do." As the article outlines, the show is not likely to change course. Basically, the very format of 24, with its unrelenting countdown to impending doom, evokes the oldest rhetorical ploy used to justify torture: hypothetical situations in which the torture of one person can save the lives of countless others. In that situation, the ethical scales are loaded so that the pressure to say endorse torture becomes overwhelming. But it's a completely manufactured scenario, because things are never that clear-cut in real life. In real life, there's doubt over the guilt of suspects; doubt over whether they actually know anything; doubt over the gravity of what's being plotted; and so on. But 24 is a powerful bit of pro-torture propaganda, because it shows the clear-cut imaginary situation (where the party is guilty and their information averts catastrophe) not just as a frequent recurrence, but almost a defining part of the narrative. On another note, it's kind of amusing to see the self-proclaimed right-wingers on the show enthusing about the possibilities of a conservative's version of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Good luck with that, fellas. Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 18.2.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Kill the Cartoon Oscar In the lead-up to the Oscars, there's always a lot of discussion around what will win, the overwhelming majority of which centers on the "big five" awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress). And whatever you think about the Oscars, there are usually some interesting |