Film

264 posts

Tintin!

Film

If you’ve been anywhere near the film geek webpages during the week you’ll have seen this news: Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are making movies of Herge’s comic book series The Adventures of Tintin. Spielberg in particular has been mentioned in relation to this property before, but it really seems to be moving forward now. Courtesy of Variety:

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are teaming to direct and produce three back-to-back features based on Georges Remi’s beloved Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin for DreamWorks. Pics will be produced in full digital 3-D using performance capture technology.

The two filmmakers will each direct at least one of the movies; studio wouldn’t say which director would helm the third… The Spielberg-Jackson project isn’t likely to languish in development for long. Spielberg could become available this fall after wrapping “Indiana Jones 4.” Jackson will wrap “Bones” by the end of the year.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing, but I’m certainly very interested. Tintin was a staple of my childhood; as I got a bit older, I cast them aside, deciding that the other big comic book series, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix was a bit hipper. Yet I came full circle when I revisited the Tintin books as an adult. They might superficially be pitched a little younger than the jokey Asterix books, but Herge was clearly the superior artist. His beautifully simple graphical style and grasp of the comic book form really sets the Tintin books apart. He also showed remarkable facility at different genres: the Tintin books range from the full-blown adventure of sending Tintin to the moon (in Explorers on the Moon) to the minimalist house-bound mystery of The Castafiore Emerald, a comic drama where the ultimate joke is that Herge generates a whole book around nothing of consequence.

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What’s Walt?

Film
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The Animated Man (Michael Barrier, University of California Press, 2007)

Walt Disney is, in my view, about the most interesting a figure to work in film in the twentieth century, for all sorts of reasons. Nobody did as much for their particular corner of the film medium as Disney did for animation: proper character animation, as we now think of it, was basically a Disney invention, created during the studio’s great creative period between the late twenties and the early forties. Disney took animation from a primitive form to its maturity; it seems likely that cartoons would have remained a very peripheral novelty had there not been Disney’s vision of something grander on the horizon. Yet Disney is also fascinating because of the way in which he lost interest and branched off from cartoons, leading to an incredible variation in the quality of the works prepared by the studio within his lifetime (Disney deservedly went from being a seriously regarded artist in the thirties to something of a critical pariah by the sixties). His devotion to amusement parks and other non-film corners of his business also foreshadowed the economic models that would define Hollywood in the last quarter of the century, with films increasingly becoming just one element in a wider suite of cultural products sold to audiences (so, for example, we don’t just get sold Spiderman the movie; we are sold Spiderman computer games, comic books, clothing, CDs, theme park rides, and the like). As a person, too, Disney is fascinating for his mix of visionary artistic ambition and staunch conservatism. So he’s a particularly rewarding subject for a biography.

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Spidey Senseless

Film Film Reviews

Spider-man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007)

There’s a really good scene at the end of Sam Raimi’s second Spider-man film that embodies everything I liked about that film and hoped for from the third one. Peter Parker, having battled with this belief that he can’t balance his life as Spider-man with his relationship with childhood sweetheart Mary Jane Watson, has just been told by Mary Jane that he can have it all. The happy ending of that film is that Mary Jane declares she will stand by his side, despite all the compromises this will involve. Just as they kiss, there’s a siren outside the window, which distracts Peter. “Go get ’em, tiger,” says Mary Jane, and we get an exultant shot of Spider-man whooping in joy as he jubilantly swings down the street. Yet Raimi doesn’t finish on that shot. Instead he cuts back to Mary Jane, watching him go, as doubt spreads across her face, and it’s on that note of ambiguity that Raimi rolls the end credits. It’s a little thing, but it’s a sign of the extra thought and attention to character that distinguishes the best genre movies. Those kind of small touches made Spider-man 2 one of the best genre films of recent years, and had me eager to see how Raimi would resolve his plot threads in third instalment. So it’s really disappointing that Spider-man 3 has turned out to be a bit of a mess.

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The Crudtastic 4

Film

Before the disappointing Spider-man 3 there is a trailer for the next Fantastic Four movie: my possibly unfair assumption is that it will suck, which might burst the recent superhero revival bubble somewhat (although there is still the next Batman film to come).

But it could be so much worse. For example, had you realised that in 1994, Roger Corman produced a version of The Fantastic Four? The rights to the series were contractually tied to the production of a movie by a certain date; if no movie was made, the producers’ option would lapse. So a movie was produced, on an absolutely rock-bottom budget, with no intention of ever releasing it (at least not through conventional channels). And of course, it now circulates as a bootleg.

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The Feel Bad Movie of the Year

Film Film Reviews

Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005)

When I saw Terry Gilliam’s Tideland at the Melbourne Film Festival last year, my immediate reaction was that the film was unreleasable. Its appearance in Australian cinemas has obviously proven me wrong. Yet its exposure to a wider population allows the opportunity to see how many, like me, find the film virtually unwatchable. Gilliam is an enormously talented filmmaker, and Tideland isn’t bad in any of the usual ways. It’s not reprehensible, or stupid, or poorly made. But it’s a deeply unpleasant experience that just doesn’t work at all.

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All Bodyguard, All the Time

Film

A colleague alerted me to this interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) that looks at a bunch of boffins who think they’ve come up with a mathematical means of identifying hit movies. It contrasts their belief that there are rules that can identify potential hit movies with William Goldman’s famous dictum that “nobody knows anything,” and suggests there are two basic approaches to the idea of “rules” in art:

What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance. He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil’s hexameters to Horace’s could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames – someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody’s looking hard enough.

I’m inclined to think that Gladwell’s boffins are barking up the wrong tree, with way too many variables in their system to ever allow reliable calculations. Gladwell starts by talking about music, an area where it seems more persuasive that their approach might work: I can see how there might be particular patterns of beat or melody that just “sound right,” and which could be mathematically described. For example, Gladwell mentions that Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” scored super-high on their scoring system, and this seems plausible: if ever there was a song that sounds like it would max out a computer’s hit-single algorithm, it’s that one.

A Cutting Room Floor a Long Time Ago

Film

When George Lucas created the Star Wars: Special Edition (which soon became Star Wars: The Only Edition) he re-introduced two major deleted scenes into the film. The first was the awful Jabba scene early in the film, and the second was Luke’s reunion with Biggs, his old friend from Tatooine, just before the final battle. While fans mostly dislike the Jabba scene, generally the Biggs scene has been accepted as a good addition to the film. Biggs’ death in the final battle now has a little more weight, and incongruity in the original cut of Luke fighting alongside his friend (or someone with the same name) with no explanation is eliminated.

However, a much longer scene with Biggs was left on the cutting room floor, and it’s easily the most interesting of the various deleted scenes from the Star Wars trilogy.

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Deep Space

Film Film Reviews

Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine has a guaranteed cult following already. It’s a seriously intentioned, adult-oriented science fiction film, and these are few and far between. There’s a sector of the nerd audience out there that latches onto any science fiction film that moves even slightly beyond Star Wars style space pyrotechnics; this is a fan base that gets its regular sustenance from literary science fiction but which will eagerly devour the few scraps of “hard” sci-fi that Hollywood gives it. Sunshine, unfortunately, might need this fan base to keep it going. Boyle has made three quarters of a great film, but I suspect those not predisposed to enjoy this genre are going to struggle to forgive its flaws.

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Here, Under Protest, is “Beef Burgers”

Film

Now here’s an oddity. For years a bootleg audio-tape has circulated of Orson Welles berating the directors of an advertisement for frozen peas, complaining about the script and the quality of their direction. It was a strange little curio, mentioned in David Thomson’s Welles biography Rosebud, and one of those little pop-culture artifacts with its own tiny infamy – witness the existence of its own Wikipedia article. (Just thinking about it now, I wonder if it wasn’t also the inspiration for the routine in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey complains about the script for an ad in which he played a tomato.)

Anyway, that bootleg was the inspiration for a sequence in the nineties TV cartoon Pinky and the Brain where a slightly cleaned-up version of the dialogue was performed by the mice. (Maurice La Marche, who voiced the Brain, is known for his Welles impression: he overdubbed Vincent D’Onofrio as Welles in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood). And now someone has gone and reunited the original Welles audio with the Pinky and the Brain animation. The result is, well, an even stranger little pop culture oddity. (This was brought to my attention, as so many of these kind of things are, by Jaime J. Weinman over at Something Old, Nothing New).

Incidentally, I asked over at the the original post what The Brain had said instead of “I’ll go down on you,” and apparently it was “I’ll make cheese for you.” Which is a fortuitous substitution, as it preserves the lip-synch.

If nothing else, the existence of the original Pinky and The Brain animation is a testament to the strange kinds of things that get slipped on to kids television when nobody at head office is paying attention. What on earth did the 99% of people who’d never heard of the “Frozen Peas” tape make of this?