Film

264 posts

Remember MIFF? (MIFF Report, Part II)

Film

Apologies for the delays in getting further posts on the Melbourne International Film Festival up. There was always going to be limited opportunity to post during the festival, since so many of the films I was seeing were in the last few days, but things were made worse by difficulties at my day job which caused a few planned films on my schedule to bite the dust. Hopefully my previous plugs for Paul Martin’s Melbourne Film Blog led anybody who was hankering for day-by-day coverage there; the boys over at Hoopla also managed to cover a reasonable number of films. One of the films I missed (El Topo) remains very much on my list to cover on the site.

What I did see was generally pretty good, and I had a better time of it than last year. So here are some quick thoughts on what I did end up seeing.

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Big and Yellow

Film Film Reviews

The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007)

One of the first gags in The Simpsons Movie is a joke about the foolishness of going to see a film of a TV show that we get weekly for free, and it’s true that there is something borderline illegitimate about a film of a TV show that’s currently in production. It isn’t just that it risks being seen as a rip-off: it’s also that it is impossible to separate the film from the series to fairly assess it as a stand-alone work. How can you judge character arcs and narrative of a film like this without placing them in the context of our familiarity with the characters and the grand serial narrative that has been The Simpsons since 1989? It’s probably foolish to even ask what sense this film would make to someone who hasn’t seen the show, since the situation will hardly arise. But that ubiquity means that in some ways The Simpsons Movie can never be anything other than a particularly long episode of the TV show, since we can never come to the experience “clean.”

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Kids

Film Miscellany

Yes, I’m going to give some thoughts on the final Harry Potter book. It’s sort of film related; this is obviously going to be one of the major film releases of 2009 or 2010. But I’ll be the first to admit that’s just an excuse to jump on board the subject of the week.

(Major spoilers for the final Harry Potter book follow).

Most of the way through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I was thinking the suits at Warner Bros must be cursing: the first three quarters of the book isn’t terribly suited to film, despite the frequent magical / action interludes. The fact that the book eschews the Hogwarts locale for most of its length robs the film of the setting that has united the series thus far, and the long months of travelling that the kids do is going to mean a lot of passage-of-time montages that are going to be tough to keep interesting.

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MIFF Busting

Film

The Melbourne International Film Festival starts next week. I’m hoping I’ll have a better experience than last year, where the films I caught were a fairly mixed bag, and the film I enjoyed the most was a fairly unexceptional kung fu flick. (See here and here for my comments at the time). Things are already looking up this year: the experience of working out what I could see has been made much easier by the festival organisers finally listing session times in the main part of the program, with the description of the films.

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Harry Potter and the Adults Who Read Children’s Books

Film Film Reviews

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007)

As a fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the biggest struggle in trying to evaluate the movie series has been in trying to evaluate them as stand-alone films. This is always a problem when looking at adaptations of familiar books, but I think it’s particularly so for the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s plotting is complex, and she fleshes out her world by indulging in numerous subplots and diversions. Her novels have therefore proven difficult to adapt: they don’t easily smooth out into the neat through lines of a typical Hollywood narrative. And while I recognised the virtues of the third and forth Potter adaptations – I didn’t think much at all of the first two, directed by Christopher Columbus – there was something inherently unsatisfying about them. I think the biggest problem is that the fun of the novels is in mulling over Rowling’s puzzles over the time it takes to read a book; Rowling can drop the clues in casually over several hundred pages, so there’s a pleasure in finally getting to a resolution. The films, constrained to two and a bit hours, have to hit every vital plot point with so little room to breathe that there’s no time to think over the main plot, let alone take pleasure in the asides or humorous details Rowling could enjoy. So even more than for most adaptations, I felt the films were simply highlights packages, like watching a trailer. I know there are many who have only seen the films and who have enjoyed them a great deal, so it must be possible to get something from these films in their own right. Yet I always find it a little bewildering, as I felt I had to put the story together in my mind by reading back in elements from the books.

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Celebrating Ten Years of Self-Indulgent Obscurity

Film Miscellany

Yes, it’s true – it is ten years to the day since I uploaded the first version of this page [ie my old website, Cinephobia]. So if you can allow me just a small moment to reflect…

When I first started this site it was really just an exercise in designing a web page: I was trying out this whole new-fangled internet thing and the only content I had to hand was stuff I’d written about film in my spare time. And it’s continued in that lackadaisical fashion since. Particularly in early years there were some enormous gaps between updates (very close to two years in one instance), and there were many times I nearly declared the page retired and took it down. But every time I was about to do so I’d think that no, I did actually enjoy maintaining it , and vow to write more often.

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RIP HD-DVD; We Hardly Knew You

Film

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.

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An Article So Good You’ll Want a Sequel

Film

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).

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Long Shots

Film

If you had more respect for the idea of blogging than I do, you could really bemoan the influence that YouTube has had on the practice. It seems a lot of bloggers, exhausted by coming up with new content all the time, have been sinking back to what I do on this corner of my site all the time: just posting interesting YouTube videos. But there are times this trend to YouTube blogging is undeniably useful, as with this post on great long tracking shots, complete with many YouTube clips giving examples. These are the ultimate show-off shots (Jaime J. Weinman talks about their unobtrusive cousins, long uncut dialogue scenes) and it’s fun to see so many in one place.

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