February 2010 Archives

The prow of the ferry in the first couple shots of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" isn't like any I've seen before. It raises up, like the visor on the headpiece of a suit of armor (or the crusher arm on a garbage truck), to let the cars on and off. It's just a little bit... odd, the sort of detail you'd expect Polanski would include -- not necessarily unsettling on its own but somehow menacing when seen through the lens of Roman Polanski. Moments later, the vehicles begin to disembark, with the exception of a car in near the front of the center lane that blocks traffic, creates a nuisance, and imparts dread. There's nobody in it. So, where did the driver go?

A few scenes later, a private plane lands at a small airport and we're given a shot of the fuselage framed around the (closed) door on the left and the first two windows on the right. Cut to a reverse angle of people waiting on the tarmac, and then back to the same basic configuration. The door pops open and it's one of those kind with the hinge on the bottom that folds down into a little set of stairs. The motion of the mechanism visually echoes the prow of the ferry. But there's something else in this shot that will come back to haunt us: the company name Hatherton, meant to recall Halliburton. It's just there, and it pops up in other shots throughout the movie, but it doesn't quite click into place until a Google search that hyperlinks pieces of various characters' pasts late in the film.

There's a little back-and-forth between me and Glenn Kenny about this Oscar-nominated picture called "Avatar" over at MSN Movies. Good heavens, I wonder, what's all this fuss about? Maybe you're just a fogey, Glenn suggests. I say I wanted to visit a world of awesome mystery and wonder, and all I got was this velvet painting of a movie. Glenn says that he wanted a state-of-the-art "ass-kicking James Cameron science fiction action movie" -- and, for him, "Avatar" delivered on that score.

Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda understood how to do it. They wrote many screenplays together, including those for some of the greatest films ever made, from "Late Spring" (1949) to "Tokyo Story" (1953) to "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962). Baths are important. And breakfast. And walks and naps. The important thing to remember is that, for the most part, writing isn't what happens when you're at your keyboard. That, to paraphrase embellish Truman Capote, is merely the typing part.

The clip above is from Kazuo Inoue's 1983 documentary about Ozu, "I Lived, But..." -- included in the Criterion DVD edition of "Tokyo Story."

Following up on this post. Click to enlarge.

(Thanks to Richard T. Jameson)

Look up at this commercial. Look down at the interview about how they made it. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. And if you're really going to put that message across, you have to respect the integrity of the frame-space. This hilarious bit is accomplished in one shot (requiring three days and quite a few takes), with only one obvious use of CGI (the appearance of the product itself) and one invisible use (erasing a piece of equipment from the shot at the end).

Buster Keaton would approve -- though he probably would have found a way to do everything in-camera.

How They Did It:

I enjoyed Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island" as a kind of retro-Universal Pictures "old dark house" horror movie re-imagined by Hitchcock in the 1950s Technicolor textures of "Dial M for Murder," "Rear Window" and "Vertigo." As Scorsese himself described a similar project in 2007's "The Key to Reserva," it's...

"like my own Hitchcock film. But it has to be the way he would have made the picture then, only making it now. But the way he would have made it then. If he was alive now, making this now, he would make it now as if he made it back then."

When you see the back-projection [or chroma key] on the boat going to Shutter Island in the first scene of the movie, you'll probably get the idea (even if you don't consciously notice that it's back-projection). The effect isn't as obvious -- shaky or grainy -- as in '50s Hitchcock, but it has that same air of hyper-unreality that suits the material just fine. If, however, you don't pick up on what Scorsese's doing by the end of the first scene, the pounding, churning, blaring über-Herrmann-esque score as the main characters approach the creepy insane asylum/prison/fortress (actually the "Passacaglia" Krzysztof Penderecki's Third Symphony) ought to darn well clue you in.

Those who think this is funny (as I do) and those who think it is not funny probably do so for the very same reasons. Your take?

A great, cut-through-the-crap piece by NYU journalism associate professor Jay Rosen at PressThink asks why reality has been declared off-limits in American political journalism. Rosen zeroes in on one key line in David Barstow's fair and balanced New York Times piece on the Tea Party movement, "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right": "It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny."

If tyranny is impending, Rosen asks, why isn't that a story? Is it enough to report that somebody is making serious allegations? Or might it be the duty of the press to report whether any evidence can be found to substantiate those allegations?

It kept coming up, but David... did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state... can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don't see how we can. [...]

I just want to say: Wow! Here are frame grabs from three shots in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 "Osaka Elegy" ("Naniwa erejî") that strikingly illustrate what in-depth staging and deep focus are all about. In the first one, we see Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a switchboard receptionist at Asai Pharmaceutical, in her glass operator booth. The image has an Art Deco sheen to it (highlights on shiny objects twinkle with little starbursts) and the frame is soft around the edges, but in the center the focus is deep. I don't know if the blurred edges are a separate artistic choice or simply an optical property of this particular lens.

Anyway, this is our introduction to Ayako, who appears in a close-up profile on the left side of the frame. She notices a woman enter the office to speak with Susumu Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), a young man with whom, we will learn, she has an undeveloped romantic friendship. Ayako places a call and we realize who she's calling when Susumu -- that's him in center frame -- answers it. (He may look a little out of focus in this particular frame, but that's only because he's moving his head.) She turns her face away from us to make eye contact with him across the room, and as she does so we see her face reflected in the glass of her booth. Fantastic! It's a spectacular composition, but it develops without seeming contrived, leading your eye from place to place in the shot quite naturally as you discover what's going on.

That's not my headline up there. It's from an unsigned entry at Huffington Post, where you'll find a clip from this recent "Family Guy" episode ("Extra-Large Medium"). I don't watch the show, so I may not understand the context of the scene in which the dumb 15-year-old son, Chris Griffin (voiced by Seth Green), goes on a date with Ellen, a girl with Down syndrome on whom he has a crush.

Here's the way Huffpo describes it:

Chicago music critics and "Sound Opinions" radio co-hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot are hosting an evening devoted to their "best rock movies of all time" Friday at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. They're not saying yet what those will be (besides, let's face it, "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Stop Making Sense" and "The Girl Can't Help It" and...). But DeRogatis was happy to eliminate some of the usual suspects in advance during an interview with the Onion A.V. Club Milwaukee. A few choice comments:

On "The Last Waltz" (Martin Scorsese, 1978): "I'm from the punk era. I believe what's great about rock 'n' roll is community and the tearing down of boundaries. And the basic thrust of 'The Last Waltz' is that these are superheroes so much better than you.."

On "U2: Rattle and Hum" (Phil Joanou, 1988): "I'm not saying it's dishonest. It absolutely shows what they are. They are big, superstar rock stars full of pretension. But for the same reason I have no desire to sit through 'Saw VII'--because torture porn makes my stomach hurt--so does 'Rattle & Hum.' [Laughs.] U2 are assholes, the movie shows them as assholes, but that doesn't make it any fun to watch."

Here's Adam Curtis's six-and-a-half-minute documentary segment on how, over the last 50 (75?) years or so, we have become a culture of increasingly paranoid weirdos. (Satirical, too.) It reminded me of "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" (2004), the essential documentary about the politics that led up to 9/11, and how they continued afterwards. And then I realized why: They're both Adam Curtis films! From the intro to "Power of Nightmares":

I saw six movies this past weekend and it was exhilarating. That's a lot for me to suck up these days (though it didn't used to be), unless I'm neck-deep in a film festival. I used to think nothing of a double-bill a day, but this was such a rich and rewarding movie-weekend that it reminded me of the great intensified cinematic forages of my 20s and 30s, when I seemed to encounter, and ravenously gobble down, fresh new masterpieces (heralded or unheralded) for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It also got me thinking about how unimaginably different the experience of finding movies to watch is now from what it was then.

Here's the breakdown: None of the movies I saw were available in my local theaters. I saw all of them at home, on the same 55" screen -- three on Comcast On Demand (two of those in HD widescreen, one in SD widescreen) and three on DVDs (all at 1.33:1) from my own library (in other words, not rentals, Netflix or otherwise). The movies themselves were made between 1947 and 2009, three were originally shot on 35mm film, one on Super 16mm, and the other on HD video. Four of them were in color, two in black and white. Three were serial-killer/corrupt cop thrillers, two comedy-dramas, and one an adaptation of a serious play about religion. None of them was American-made, but three were in English (though sometimes it was hard to tell), two in Japanese and one in Danish. Two were sanctified classics, one a lesser effort by one of cinema's greatest directors, and the other three recent works by established but not particularly well-known British filmmakers. All but one were new to me -- and that one I hadn't seen I booked it in 16mm, as a Seattle premiere, in a university film series 30 years ago.

OK, here's what I saw, in order:

The For the Love of Film Blogathon (co-hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation) has already inspired Greg Ferrara at Cinema Styles to come up with these two groovy announcements. I hope I can think up something worthy of contribution -- but meanwhile I'm certainly going to be soaking up all the terrific stuff that's come flooding in...

P.S. Anybody remember when the Scherzo from Beethoven's Ninth (used in the montage above) served as the theme for NBC's nightly newscast, the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley? Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Orchestra, of course. "Good night, Chet. Good night, David. And good night for NBC News."

I was watching Akira Kurosawa's 1948 "Stray Dog" the other night, in which a nightclub owner said one of his chorus girls was "sick" with "her monthlies." This is not something you could have heard in a Hollywood film in 1948. But it reminded me of several things I wanted to let you know about this particular month:

1) It's Un Mumf de Odienator at Big Media Vandalism again -- that is, the third annual Black History Mumf! Odie kicks things off with a stellar appreciation of "Boyz N the Hood," capping it with a personal note:

Black History Mumf is all about my confessions, which I wrap up and hide in these pieces. Growing up, I was Tre minus the bad temper. I was the smartest kid most of my friends and family knew, and for that I was ostracized, beaten up, and ignored by the girls. They went for the guys I knew who sold drugs. It seemed like everybody I knew was up to that, or stealing cars, so I wanted to participate as well. I wanted to belong, to be popular, to have the girls like me too.

Quentin Tarantino told a BAFTA audience in London last month that he'd like to remembered for a body of work, like Howard Hawks.

This sparked a discussion between Anne Thompson and Jack Mathews of moviefone.com over at the indieWire-hosted Thompson on Hollywood (cross-posted at Slate Film Salon) -- a "dueling blog" about whether Tarantino (who told the New York Times that he worked quickly to get "Inglourious Basterds" ready for Cannes because he "wanted to have a masterpiece before the decade's out") can be said to have produced "a legacy of greatness":

JM -- ... No question, he has proven his greatness to his hardcore fans, among whose numbers many critics and film scholars can be counted. But in the 16 years since "Pulp Fiction," he has not come close to matching that film's brilliance. His movies, while enjoyable to watch, are self-indulgent games for him. If "Inglourious Basterds" is a great war movie, "Blazing Saddles" is a great Western. They're both fun but that's all they are.



AT --Wow. Do movies have to educate us?

It's a movie. No, it's a ride. No, it's a movie and a ride! Variety reports that Koreans have been lining up for 4D "ride films," beginning with last year's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." The 4D, "five-sense" version of "Avatar" now features

more than 30 effects during the 3D film's 162 minute run, including moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind. Despite the much higher $15.80 ticket price (an average ticket costs $6.90), screenings are regularly sold out.

"We (started to) prepared the 'Avatar' 4D ride last summer," says Tom Oh, prexy of 20th Century Fox Korea. [...]

"There is no 4D theater like ours around the world. CGV's 4D plex is the first in the world that fully offers five-sense experiences with a movie title," says Kim Daehee, publicity manager of CJ-CGV.

Coming: 4D versions of Chris Columbus's "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" and others.

Are we circling back around to flight-simulator theme park attractions built around movie "narratives," like Disney's 1987 Star Tours "Star Wars" ride? (Or, for that matter, like 1955's Peter Pan's Flight at Disneyland?) At what point does the experience cease to become a movie experience (as we've known it since the beginning of the 20th Century) and become a virtual reality simulation? The "ride movie" has nearly become a (sub-)genre of its own since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" perfected the form -- and movies are often based on video games or even amusement park rides ("Rollercoaster," "Pirates of the Caribbean"), so is this just another gimmick -- like William Castle's Percepto process for 1959's "The Tingler," or Universal's Sensurround for 1974's "Earthquake" (and other "immersive" disaster movies), or John Waters' Odorama for 1981's "Polyester"? Have we been here before (just another element in a cross-promotable "transmedia storytelling platform"), or is this something "new"? And, in any case, does it (or 3-D) satisfy the same appetites that have traditionally attracted people to movies? Now that they're retro-fitting existing movies for additional dimensionality, what would a 4-D Eric Rohmer movie be like? How about a 4-D "My Dinner with Andre" -- with the smell of real dinner? Would a 4-D Rob Zombie movie allow the audience to actually feel the pain of the victims onsceen?

Meanwhile, Wim Wenders is making 3-D movies in Italy...

(tip: Steven Santos)

In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard famously proclaimed that tracking shots are a matter of morality -- an inversion of fellow Cahier du cinéma critic Luc Moullet's formulation that "morality is a matter of tracking shots" ("morale set affaire de travellings," sometimes translated as "morality is in the tracking shots"). The evangelical theorists behind what became known as the French New Wave had a tendency to ascribe moral values to cinematic style and technique.¹ André Bazin and the late Eric Rohmer, especially, championed the moral as well as aesthetic superiority of mise en scène over montage, of Hawksian "invisible cutting" over dictatorial Eisensteinian editing, and of deep-focus over a more selective, shallow depth-of-field. Bazin praised directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler (in collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland) for staging shots so that "the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend."

As David Bordwell summarized:

Their "deep-focus" style, he claimed, produced a more profound realism than had been seen before because they respected the integrity of physical space and time. According to Bazin, traditional cutting breaks the world into bits, a series of close-ups and long shots. But Welles and Wyler give us the world as a seamless whole. The scene unfolds in all its actual duration and depth. Moreover, their style captured the way we see the world; given deep compositions, we must choose what to look at, foreground or background, just as we must choose in reality. [...]

[Bazin wrote that deep-focus] "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."

The tweet from Errol Morris came through a little before noon on Saturday, January 30:

SENSELESS TRAGEDY: My beloved editor Karen Schmeer was killed last night by a car used in the robbery of a drugstore. She was 39 years old.

It was a freak hit-and-run accident just before 8 p.m.on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Karen Schmeer, on her way home from working on an HBO documentary about chess player Bobby Fischer, was crossing Broadway at 90th when she was struck by a rented 2010 Dodge Avenger, which was being pursued by police following a Zyrtec robbery at the CVS pharmacy on 86th and Amsterdam. The alleged driver was arrested and charged with second degree murder. Two other male suspects fled on foot.

If all the year-end and decade-end lists (even though we realize the decade isn't actually over until 2011) have left you dizzied and depleted, take heart! Perhaps you've missed out on some of the more invigorating, far-sighted list-based ventures. Over at Some Came Running, for example, Glenn Kenny conducted an ingenious and fascinating project, going back and taking a look at the late Manny Farber's Best Films of 1951. Meanwhile, at The Crop Duster, Robert Horton is engaged in surveying the year's best -- in non-chronological order -- from, oh, about 1919 or so, to the present, posting a new list every Sunday. What fantastic delights are to be found in these itemized accounts...

Traditionally (or, perhaps a better word is "statistically"), in order for film to win the Best Picture, it has to also receive director, screenplay, editing and acting nominations. Of the ten BP nominees this year, only "The Hurt Locker," "Inglourious Basterds" and "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" were nominated in all the winning categories.

Sure, there have been exceptions. James Cameron's "Titanic" screenplay didn't get nominated, either. And remember the stink when "Driving Miss Daisy" won Best Picture without even a nomination for its director, Bruce Beresford?

Some Muriel history here. She's alive.