Film

264 posts

Not Actually About the Animals

Film Film Reviews

Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi, 2007)

A lot of the time, when you hear observers of the film business talk about how particular films are likely to perform, you hear them theorise about how a particular film might attract a fervent cult following, but has no prospects for wider commercial success because the central characters aren’t “likeable” or – more obscurely – “relatable.” Like most attempts to explain the mysterious alchemy of commercial success, I haven’t generally been impressed by the worth of this notion as a predictor (as opposed to its undoubted value as a self-perpetuating rationalisation for marketing gurus). Yet I kept thinking about it as I mulled over my reaction to Taika Waititi’s comedy Eagle vs Shark.

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Beowulf vs Animation

Film

Robert Zemeckis’ new computer-animated epic Beowulf is modelled as the future of cinema. Designed for high-definition digital 3-D projection, it is Hollywood’s latest attempt to create a unique theatrical experience that can’t be downloaded. Yet the film is something of an oddity. Despite Zemeckis having paid tribute to the classic cartoonists with his 1988 feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, his new film is deeply at odds with the traditional practice of animation.

Beowulf advances “performance-capture” techniques Zemeckis had previously used on his 2004 film The Polar Express, in which the movements of actors are mapped directly onto digital characters. Peter Jackson did a similar thing to use performances by Andy Serkis as the basis for Gollum in his Lord of the Rings trilogy and Kong in King Kong, with celebrated results. Yet Jackson was working to achieve characters that couldn’t be achieved by traditional means, and the motion-captured performance was considerably reworked by a team of animators.

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State of the Artless

Film Film Reviews

Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

Beowulf is a test-bed for a combination of technologies that might be the future of the movies. It utilises “performance capture” animation, which some think will revolutionise computer animation. In many theatres it is being exhibited in 3-D, and that technology is acting as something of a trojan horse for the accelerated roll-out of digital cinemas. And its regular theatrical release is paired with showings in IMAX. It’s all very reminiscent of the 1950s, when extreme widescreen processes and early 3-D were used to try to give theatrical exhibition a competitive advantage against the threat of television. Today, the threats are DVD and illegal downloads, but the impetus is much the same. And Robert Zemeckis, in particular, has devoted much of the last decade to this technology: he hasn’t made a live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, and won’t for some years (with his next picture locked in as the computer-animated A Christmas Tale, due in 2009).

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Close and Choppy

Film

One of the best people writing about film is David Bordwell, co-author of the textbook Film Art, a staple of university film courses. 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.

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Blade Runner Keeps Running

Film Urban Planning and Film

The Digital Bits has a detailed write-up of the new version of Blade Runner, the – allegedly – “Final Cut,” which will be released on DVD in December (and which can be ordered through Amazon here).

Blade Runner (along with Close Encounters) has always been the textbook film demonstrating both the benefits and the pitfalls of preparing revised versions of classic films. The benefits are clear because the Director’s Cut is so clearly a better version. Yet it also illustrated the problems these director’s versions can produce: there are usually compromises involved in making the director’s cut, which may create new problems or shortcomings, and the original cut (which remains historically important and for some might be the preferred version) can fall out of circulation. So for years it was hard to get the original version of Blade Runner; other films, like Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars and Touch of Evil are locked in similar limbo.

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Indiana Jones and the Endless Jokes About Harrison Ford’s Age

Film

The title and logo for the new Indiana Jones movie are out. Wait for it:


It’s pretty hard to get excited about this. It’s a very cumbersome title, for a start (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Skull would be better). And according to a quick Wikipedia search – surely the definitive source for information about bullshit mythology – the Crystal Skull ties into folklore about both Atlantis and the Knights Templar. Atlantis is not a promising concept (all films involving scenes set underwater suck) and the Knights Templar link raises too many other links to both Last Crusade and The Da Vinci Code.

The rumour is we’ll see the first trailer in front of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf in November.

Rats!

Film Film Reviews

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)

Pixar’s newest film, Ratatouille, sees the studio’s gun director, Brad Bird, try his hand at saving a troubled production. The result is a somewhat messy and not completely satisfactory film, but still one that sees the studio expanding the horizons of the form.

Bird is an exciting figure. He worked with Disney in the 1980s, and was mentored by legendary animator Milt Kahl, before becoming one of the key creative personnel in the early years of The Simpsons. He then directed the acclaimed (but underseen) The Iron Giant for Warner Bros before joining Pixar to helm The Incredibles. It’s a career progression that moves from a start under one of animation’s great figures, to a key role in the renaissance of television animation, and then a shift to theatrical features just as that area was growing moribund again after a revival in the nineties. As everyone else’s features have grown more and more alike – with jive-talking animals, fart jokes and pop culture gags galore – Bird’s films have remained distinct. They stand apart from even the generally superior films produced by Pixar: while the other Pixar films show a clear house style that is very much driven by the sensibilities of Toy Story director John Lasseter (and which in Cars had started to slide towards mediocrity), Bird’s films are distinguished by their more adult tone and adventurous subject matter.

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Plonk!

Film Film Reviews

Dr Plonk (Rolf de Heer, 2007)

Rolf de Heer’s new film, Dr Plonk, is built on a brave and irresistible premise. De Heer has made a real, honest-to-God silent movie, evoking about as closely as possible the feel of a silent comedy from the 1920s. The only remotely similar project I can think of is Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, from 1976, but that film did things by halves: shooting in colour and (typically for Brooks) showing only the vaguest sympathy for the genre he was supposedly channelling. De Heer, by contrast, brings to Dr Plonk a serious filmmaker’s urging to get the little things right: the film is shot in black and white using hand-cranked cameras; the camera moves only occasionally, and is shaky when it does; there are intertitles, written with a good ear (eye?) for the style of period titles; and there’s even a slight variability in the brightness of the film that matches that seen in silent prints. The illusion is remarkable, and in the early passages, before the time-travel plot kicks in and the eponymous doctor travels o the present day, there’s really little other than the familiar face of Magda Szubanski to give this away as a contemporary production. At that level, it’s a remarkable achievement, and as a fan of silent films I really, really wanted to enjoy Dr Plonk more than I did. Unfortunately, de Heer’s film also shows up the difficulties of reviving what is basically a dead form.

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The Beowulf Express

Film

A new trailer for Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf has hit the net.

I’ll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.)

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