Odds & Ends
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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  
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 19, 2005
Better Than Ever
Jim Schembri, the film critic for the EG section in The Age, published an interesting piece in that paper on Friday about Hollywood films. After apparently having an exceptionally unpleasant time with Mr & Mrs Smith - a movie I chose not to inflict on myself - he was moved to write a long piece on how Hollywood films really suck these days. (For the next few days it will be available here, although registration may be required.) The basic argument is that big "event" movies like Mr & Mrs Smith don't actually need to be good: they open to enormous business based upon saturation marketing, and turn a profit before word gets out that they suck. The marketing media machine is, essentially, making quality irrelevant and thus making both Hollywood movies and their audiences dumber:
This argument probably sounds familiar even if you haven't read Schembri's article, because it gets trotted out a lot. Professional film critics, who unlike amateurs such as myself have to see pretty much everything that comes out, often seem to break down under the drudgery and announce the death of cinema. The name I've dubbed for this condition over the years of seeing it in action is "MAWTUT-B Syndrome" - an acronym for "Movies Aren't What They Used To Be." (I didn't say it was a good name). Schembri is at least in good company: even the best critics seem to succumb after a while. Not coincidentally, they invariably suggest movies went downhill sometime after they started reviewing (ie, when they lost the ability pick and choose what they watch). The famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote her definitive MAWTUT-B piece, "Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers," back in 1980. (You can find it in her books Taking it All In and For Keeps). While Kael's explanation differs slightly from Schembri's (she's talking about the corporatisation of Hollywood and the packaging of movies for TV), the sentiment is much the same. Indeed, the opening sentences of that essay could be grafted directly into Schembri's article: The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. Such articles aren't entirely without basis: Schembri's description of the mechanics of blockbusters is generally valid, and Kael was accurately diagnosing a profound shift in the structure of Hollywood. Yet I think such articles start to falter when they talk of movies getting worse or audiences getting dumber. (If audiences have been getting progressively dumber since 1980, it's a wonder we can still buy our tickets). When Kael decried the audience's desire for "noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way," the example of the empty blockbuster she chose was Alien, a film we now tend to think of as a classic. There are a few interrelated problems at work here. Firstly, as I've suggested, critics tend to get worn down by the sheer number of poor-to-average movies they have to sit through for each good one. It's easy to see why they get nostalgic for the movies of their youth, and the days before watching films became a chore. Secondly, there is the related issue of selection: we tend only to see the good films from previous eras, but we see a much wider sample of the films coming out today. It is easy to forget just how many really bad movies have been made and forgotten in previous decades. Good films are hard to make: they have always been, and will always remain, the minority. Also, just like the rest of us, critics like certain genres or filmmaking movements more than others, and when their favorite type of film goes into inevitable decline, filmgoing is never the same for them. So Bill Collins grew up with the classical Hollywood studio pictures, and has spent the rest of his life mourning their passing. Peter Biskind, like Kael, loved the work of American directors in the 1970s, and wrote Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about how their era - "the last Golden Age of movies" - passed. Again, there are legitimate cycles and trends being identified here, but they don't amount to the death of cinema. I'd even question the hypothesis that Hollywood movies are getting worse. Schembri mentions Roland Emmerich's 1996 film Independence Day as one of the points where the rot set in, but as bad as it is (and I'm no Emmerich fan, as I've made clear elsewhere), I think it would be hard to sustain an argument that it is worse than the equally jingoistic Top Gun, from ten years before, or Irwin Allen disaster movies from the 1970s. He also mentions Jaws, which despite its justifiably solid critical reputation is a popular candidate as the film that killed quality moviemaking in Hollywood. The argument is that Jaws, along with Star Wars, pioneered the model of returning to simple genre narratives, filling them with action, and opening them widely in a blaze of publicity. Which is true, to a point. But Hollywood always made films like Jaws and Star Wars and even ones like Mr & Mrs Smith. It's just that they weren't the big prestige pictures. The blockbusters of the late 1970s inverted the Hollywood idea of what was a big movie, so that disreputable genres (science fiction, horror, thrillers) became the high profile movies. Essentially, what had in old Hollywood been B-movies became blockbusters, while many of the previously most popular genres (such as musicals and melodramas) went into decline. But just because the most hyped movies are what used to be B-movies doesn't mean that there are more actual bad movies being made. Even the idea that a movie doesn't need to be good because hype can get it across the line is a bit overstated. It's certainly true that movie companies rely on a big publicity campaign and a fast return on investment to reduce the risk associated with expensive productions, but that's not the same as not needing films to be any good. Schembri talks in somewhat conflicted terms about the importance of movies performing well after the first weekend: Nobody ever hangs out hoping for great second-weekend figures, because by then the film's fate has been well and truly sealed. Big films can't afford the luxury of growing or finding audiences.Which, despite Schembri's assertion that the fate of a film is "sealed" after the first week, means quality does matter. Just because modern movie-making loads the box-office towards the "front-end"of its run doesn't mean subsequent weeks can be disregarded. While it's true that blockbusters will almost never grow an audience after their opening, holding one is highly desirable. That's why Titanic made so much money - it got a lot of return business and kept the "drop-off" in later weeks as small as possible. Studios can, to a certain degree, buy that opening weekend, but it's the subsequent weeks that make for a really big hit. Indeed, if we look beyond the most brainless of mega-budget blockbusters, I think its arguable that movies (including Hollywood movies) are getting better, not worse. I'm not sure I entirely believe this - I said it was arguable, remember - but when there are still Hollywood movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Incredibles and Return of the King and Kill Bill Volume 2 and Sideways out there rubbing shoulders with Catwoman and Godzilla, then I feel someone has to say that maybe movie culture as we know it isn't about to die a horrible death. So while there's a whiff of devil's advocate about my argument, I think it at least needs to be made. Look at this way: cinema is a young medium. It's barely over one hundred years old, and cinema with sound is less than eighty. Many of the film classics we know are developmental works, famous because they were the first to utilise a particular technique. The technical capabilities of cinema continue to expand, and as they do so the artistic boundaries expand concurrently. Filmmakers are still exploring the limits of the medium, which is part of what makes filmgoing so fun. This means that more recent films are at least potentially able to draw on a richer heritage of filmmaking experience. Think of it like a language: as the language matures, the vocabulary available to its speakers increases. Which is not to say that any older film is inferior to a more recent film: few films (old or new) make use of the full possibilities the medium presents, and the form was mature enough by about the forties that good filmmakers could achieve results that still look exceptional today. (Citizen Kane, for example, is still astonishing as both a technical and artistic achievement). Yet if you believe that something was added to cinema by the French New Wave, or the "New Hollywood" of the seventies, or the Hong Kong Cinema of the eighties and nineties, or any of the other important filmmaking movements of the last fifty years, then don't you have to believe that the artistic possibilities open to a filmmaker today are richer? Granted, a routine Hollywood popcorn flick such as Mr & Mrs Smith is not taking full advantage of that legacy. But some films do, and I think as a result we do expect more of our films today. Would a film such as Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jour (The Rules of the Game) be so acclaimed if it were released today? Or would people observe that perhaps the much-praised rabbit hunt sequence labored its point somewhat? This might seem insensitive to the qualities of that film, but my point is that the blend of comedy and tragedy in that film, which seemed so noteworthy to postwar critics, is something that we would expect of any arthouse movie released today with similar subject matter. This is not to degrade Renoir, but to note how filmmakers since have drawn on and expanded upon his artistic approach. Another to ponder: would anyone get away with Last Year at Marienbad today? When you have films that play with the narrative reality in the assured way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does, who would have the patience for a film that deconstructed the artifice of film but which failed to make any other coherent point? Those are both arthouse films, but I think the argument becomes even stronger when you turn to Hollywood films. There are a lot of bad Hollywood films about (as there always were), but if you look at the general level of craftsmanship that we expect from a run-of-the-mill film, it has only gotten better. When we harken back for the golden age of Hollywood, I think what we usually mean is that we miss particular genres that have gone into decline, like musicals, or comedies of the type produced in the silent era. But there are things we have now that we didn't have then. We even have a whole new form that has appeared in the last fifteen years (computer animation) which is having its golden age right now. Because of the way film genres rise and fall, it's very hard finding equivalent films from different eras to compare. But as an example, take a film like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. A great film, yes. But consider Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day, which is structured around the same basic premise of some kind of magical intervention forcing a man to rethink his life. Because Ramis' film builds on Capra's, it can move beyond the quite simple Christmas Carol-esque device Capra uses and get into much more complex metaphysical territory, while still remaining a light and funny film. I honestly think that considered objectively it is the better film (even with Andie MacDowell), but this is a hard conclusion to draw because of the attendant mystique that is attached to the earlier film. And this is the problem: when we compare current films to old films, the new ones lack the accompanying cultural associations and haze of nostalgia. For another example, consider The Matrix. We have never had a Hollywood science fiction film that so successfully blended cinematic action with the kind of scientific and philosophical speculation that is found in literary sci-fi. It is, I think, a better science fiction film than any that has come before. If you compare The Matrix to Blade Runner, its immediate predecessor as holder of the title Hollywood's smartest science fiction film, you'll see how much more advanced the newer film is. Blade Runner is now recognised as a classic, but underneath its wonderful visual look it's a very simple film, with simple ideas. And they only get simpler as you go back further in time: even 2001, which I love, is not a terribly intellectually sophisticated film. 2001 and Blade Runner are both important films, but other movies since have built on their legacy, upping the ante for the kind of material cinematic science fiction can tackle. It's always difficult to stand up and say that film from the last few years is a future classic: it can seem silly and presumptuous. If I say this about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, you'd probably tell me it was a good film, but that I was a little ahead of myself. But that's what people would have said if you'd said the same about The Matrix in 1999, or Blade Runner in 1982, or Taxi Driver in 1976, or 2001 in 1968, or The Searchers in 1956, or It's a Wonderful Life in 1946. Which doesn't mean I'm right: I'm just trying to point out that the classics of tomorrow are always sitting underneath our noses, enjoyed but not revered at the time they're released. Critics can never spot these films with certainty, but I think it should be a part of their role to try. Apart from anything else, doing so is the best way to look past the myriad poor-to-indifferent movies in cinemas at any given time, and to retain some faith in the art form. Update, 20/6/05: I sent an email to Jim Schembri to alert him of this piece, and he was nice enough to respond with the following comments:
Which is a fair point: while I was using Schembri's article as a starting-off point, and deliberately broadening the argument, I could have been fairer in how I did so. Labels: commentary, snobbery Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 19.6.05 - 0 comments
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