Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Stan Winston and the Monsters You Can See

Film

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.

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Boston Crazy

Television

Originally published in the Age Green Guide, 12 June 2008.

Boston Legal, the strange hybrid of legal issues-based drama and comedy that recently returned to Channel 7 for its fourth series, walks a familiar tightrope for its creator David E. Kelley. Even at their best, Kelley’s shows somehow straddle the fine line that separates the very good TV from the very bad, and Boston Legal is no exception.

The show takes all the hallmarks of earlier Kelley productions – which include Picket Fences, Ally McBeal, Boston Public and The Practice – and takes them even further to the extreme. Kelley’s previous shows have been notable for his fondness for outrageous, almost hysterical plots: one episode of Picket Fences centred on a cow giving birth to a human baby; the high school drama Boston Public featured a teacher who used a gun to subdue his students; and even The Practice (ostensibly the prestige drama on Kelley’s resume) had its lawyers stalked by a serial killer dressed as a nun.

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Because We all Remember How the Last Movie I Posted the Trailer for Turned Out

Film

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 classical western, despite a few attempts and the fact that the genre is so suited to being transposed here (it isn’t cool to say this, but Man From Snowy River probably got closest). Luhrmann just might have cracked it.

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The Auditor-General’s Report: Beyond the Headlines

Urban Planning

The tabling in Parliament on 7 May of the Victorian Auditor-General’s report into the functioning of Victoria’s Planning Land Use and Development Framework on was accompanied by a splash of media headlines that picked up on the most alarming of its findings. Subsequent events have only increased the timeliness of the report, since its negative findings about the performance of local government have no doubt helped to support – in popular perception, even if not by design – the government’s recent decision to strip some planning control over activity centres from councils. The popular media reports on the audit strongly picked up on the theme of serous dysfunction at local government level presented in the report’s findings. This was an important aspect of the Auditor-General’s conclusions, but the audit also turned up some other interesting nuggets.

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“It’s Not Called the Temple of Roses: It’s Called the Temple of Doom.”

Film Film Reviews

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984)

In the lead-up to the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a longstanding argument was revived. Which is the second best Indiana Jones film: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? The two films split fans of the series down the middle; they are so different, and the qualities people value in each are so different, that there is no room for agreement. (It’s one of those arguments where both sides are surprised that the other could even pose such a question.) About the only thing that unites everyone is the unstated assumption that, of course, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the untouchable, streets-ahead best of the series. I, too, love that film: I can’t fault so much as a single shot, line-reading, or camera angle. It’s funny and exciting. Harrison Ford is awesome as Indiana Jones, and the supporting cast are all fantastic. A number of sequences – the flying wing fight, in particular – are amongst the most skilfully mounted in Spielberg’s extraordinary oeuvre. But here’s my dirty little secret… as time has gone by, I think I have come to love Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom even more than Raiders.

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Clever Meets Stupid: Criticism, Theory, and Spielberg Apologists

Film

Citizen Spielberg, (Lester D. Friedman, University of Illinois Press, 2006)

Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Andrew M. Gordon, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)

DAVID ST HUBBINS [Michael McKean]: It’s such a fine line between stupid, and…

DEREK SMALLS [Harry Shearer]: … and clever.

– This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)

Two familiar devices are used to frame the discussion of Steven Spielberg’s films in Lester D. Friedman’s Citizen Spielberg and Andrew M. Gordon’s Empire of Dreams. The first is the mandatory apology: the slightly defensive opening where the author justifies their interest in such a populist and ubiquitous filmmaker. One would hope such protestations are no longer needed, but I suspect Friedman has not exaggerated the snobbishly dismissive reactions of many colleagues when he told them the subject of his book. Dropping Spielberg’s name with any enthusiasm into a film-related discussion is still a faux pas worthy of the same sort of awkward silence that might follow a fart at a dinner party; we should not be harsh on authors for offering such an apologetic opening while these attitudes prevail.1 The second familiar introductory refrain is that the existing work on the subject is patchy or misguided, allowing the present author to sweep in and produce a definitive account. With regards to coverage, the case is hard to make; Spielberg’s work has been the subject of a number of book length studies already.2 While these, of course, have their own quirks and flaws, collectively they amount to a substantial body of critical work, and it is hard to sustain an argument that Spielberg’s work is under-discussed. Gordon’s approach is to differentiate his book by concentrating on a niche of Spielberg’s filmography (albeit a large niche that covers much of his output) – science fiction and fantasy films; while Friedman distinguishes his book from the others which he categorises as either biography, interviews, behind-the-scenes accounts or “general commentaries for fans” (p.1). However, I’m not sure that such categorical nit-picking can really sustain Friedman’s contention that scholars have “ignored” Spielberg (p.1). What is perhaps more accurate – and this brings us back to the point about snobbery – is that the vast amount of critical and academic work on Spielberg has failed to substantially shift opinions of his basic merits as a filmmaker. Peter Biskind’s Spielberg-and-Lucas-destroyed-Hollywood narrative is still all-too widespread.3, and there remains a tendency to fixate on certain aspects of his style (like characters gaping up at bright lights) that are perhaps more appropriate to a study of his work circa 1983. I have little doubt that Spielberg’s reputation will rise over time, as a generation of critics and theorists who have grown up with Spielberg and have an ingrained sympathy towards him come to the fore.4 For now, though, there is enough orthodoxy in the approach to Spielberg that Friedman and Gordon can cast themselves as iconoclasts for offering even a limited defence of him.

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Avery, Jones, Clampett

Film

A really interesting bit of animation history appeared over at Thad Komorowski’s blog: the infamous “Jones-Avery letter.” It is an open letter written by Chuck Jones (and annotated by Tex Avery) angrily denouncing Clampett’s attempts to “claim” the history of Warner Bros. cartoons. Michael Barrier adds his commentary from an old essay on the letter here; the letter also provides interesting background to this essay by Milton Gray here.

In happier times: L to R, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett, circa 1935

It’s one of the great stories of animation: the three best directors at Warner Bros., and I think arguably the three greatest figures – outside of Disney – of animation’s Golden Age, start as collaborators and finish in their twilight years bickering over their legacy. Jones, in particular, would barely acknowledge Clampett’s existence when he talked about the studio.

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Iron Man 2: Early Review

Film

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 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.

But once they’ve done so, in the above cases where the first films enjoyed significant economic (and critical) success, the directors are given a bit more leeway, are allowed to drive the family car a little further and a little faster. In each case, the second film in the series by the same director has been significantly more idiosyncratic. Batman Returns has much more of Burton’s sense of humor and interest in the grotesque; X-Men 2 is a much more serious and ambitious film narratively and thematically, more obviously the product of a prestige filmmaker (Singer’s never been an auteur by any stretch, so that will have to do). Spider-Man seemed sort of anonymous in terms of style, but Spider-Man 2 had a much more extensive and playful use of classic Raimi techniques: short, fast zooms; canted angles; rapid camera movements; whimsical motivations for techniques, like the mechanical-tentacle POV shot (virtually a repeat of his flying-eyeball POV from Evil Dead 2).

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.

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