Stills

Apologies for the absence of material for the website lately; apart from the usual non-filmy stuff, I’ve been working on an article / review for Senses of Cinema which has kept me occupied. Hence the cluster of minor items today as I post a few tidbits I hadn’t had time to address.

One thing I wanted to point out, for the academicy / bloggery type people who read this site, is this article by Kristin Thompson that reaffirms her longstanding argument in favour of the legality of using film stills – rather than publicity stills – in support of film criticism. I’ve relied on her reasoning for a long time, and it still seems sound to me. I just point this out because I still see a lot of books and websites still illustrated primarily with publicity stills (indeed, both the books I talked about in my SOS article rely largely on such stills). I’ve never had any interest in using such stills: I’d rather rely on images that actually come from the movie itself to illustrate my points.

For popular review type websites, use of publicity stills is usually harmless enough, but in the case of academic books, it’s another subtle factor that seems to encourage authors not to worry about close analysis of what is actually on screen (the primary factor in this remains laziness). So I just thought that Thompson’s article was worth a nod. Vive La Film Still!

Car Parking Controls Given Heritage Listing

Shopping Center Parking Lot

Plans to reform the parking controls in the Planning Scheme have been thrown into disarray following the extension of the heritage controls to cover Clause 52.06 of Victorian Planning Schemes.

The heritage protection comes after the objectives of the heritage overlay were extended to cover issues of natural, cultural, architectural, social and bureaucratic significance. It represents a win for proponents of the emerging field of administrative heritage.

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Simplicity and Clutter

Horton Hears a Who! (Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino, 2008)

We’ve entered the second decade of computer-animated movies (Toy Story having come out way back in 1995), and we are now starting to see the really interesting things that can be done visually with the medium. When I wrote about Ratatouille, I remarked upon the fantastic look it had, which seemed to me a leap ahead of other such films I’d seen; now the new film from animation studio Blue Sky, Horton Hears a Who!, pushes the medium in a different way by adapting the distinctive visual look of Dr Seuss to computer animation. They do a good job: the film has some really exciting visual moments. Yet it’s hamstrung by the accumulated bad habits of a decade of these kinds of films.

The success of the Blue Sky studios’ visual translation of Seuss’ art isn’t apparent until a little way into the film. The opening sequences, set in the jungle and featuring the Jim Carrey voiced Horton, show only a light Seuss influence in the visuals and character design. Only the distinct Seussian rhyming in the narration (and the story itself) point to the Seuss source. However, once Horton hears the Who – a tiny being on a speck of dust that floats past Horton – and we enter the world of Whoville, the visuals pick up considerably. One of the opening shots of Whoville is a giddy flying shot over the town, and its great to see the world of Dr Seuss brought to life like this, complete with its rounded architecture and elaborate stairs and ramps. It’s a really good moment, and is at least a part pay-off of the admirable ambition of Blue Sky in adapting such classic material. For all the fuss about Pixar – whose work generally remains far superior to Blue Sky’s – they haven’t attempted to take on a source so well loved, or so distinctive.

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Location, Location, Location

I still don’t see enough discussion of the importance of location in film. It’s not that it doesn’t get discussed at all; I’ve seen a fair few academic books and articles over the years that touch on it, and the recent upsurge of interest in the depiction of cities in film (which leads to books like Celluloid Skyline and Screening the City and The Cinematic City) reflects a fairly closely related interest. But I’ve felt for a long time now that location is one of the most critical elements in a film; it often seems to me that the places and locations we see in films deserve much more primacy in discussion about movies.

When I think about my favourite movies, one thing that strikes me is how many of them create a vivid sense of place; I love films that make me feel like I’ve visited somewhere. That isn’t just for obvious epic style movies in exotic locales, like a Lawrence of Arabia; I’m thinking about movies in all sorts of genres, and all sorts of types of locations. So it might be the L.A. suburbs of E.T., or the New England town of Jaws, or Woody Allen’s idealised New York in Manhattan, or the frontier backwoods of McCabe and Mrs Miller, or even the fantasy environments of the original Star Wars. One of the key things that separates these films from their less successful imitators is the sense of immersion in those places that they offer.

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Building a Better System

Planning News April 2008
Planning News April 2008

This article originally appeared under a joint by-line with Tim  Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 3 (April 2008): 8-13. I was the lead author but incorporated some material from my co-editors.

Back in December last year, after the release of the poor results on the PIA planning report card, we noted that such a negative self-assessment was not a luxury that the planning profession could afford. We argued that in order to justify our continued existence, planners need to make sure that the planning system dramatically improves. We argued that such improvement needed to achieve two broad objectives:

  • The system has to be able to deliver better outcomes; and
  • It has to do so while imposing less burden on the community.

The following discussion outlines some of the ways that might be achieved. It is based on suggestions garnered from our calls for contributions over recent months, our own experiences, and countless informal discussions with frustrated colleagues over the years. What follows is by no means definitive: it is hoped that by collating some of these ideas (many of which are familiar old chestnuts) in one place, we can prompt both further discussion and an increased sense of purpose and urgency in the move for planning system reform.

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Is Film Theory Bullshit? A Look Back at Noël Carroll’s Mystifying Movies

Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (Noël Carroll, Columbia University Press, 1988)

Anyone who makes a habit of writing or even talking about films in any depth – debating meanings, interpretations, and so on – will sooner or later get the dismissive response: “well, you can make it mean anything, really, can’t you?” It can be a frustrating reaction, because often it is prompted by a knee-jerk resistance to the idea that there’s anything deeper going on in a medium such as film that is so synonymous with popular entertainment. It becomes particularly maddening when it can be easily verified that an interpretation under discussion was intended by the filmmakers: so, for example, if someone is dismissive of the idea that High Noon has a subtext commenting on McCarthayism, despite screenwriter Carl Foreman having endorsed that reading. At the same time, though, such scepticism serves a purpose in demanding some sort of justification: either a recourse to evidence that the filmmaker intended a reading, or an explanation of why a reading unintended by the filmmaker is nevertheless plausible and useful. That’s a positive impulse, and part of the fun of interpreting and discussing films is haggling over where to draw the line between an interesting interpretation and  an unsustainable crock.

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New Tunnel to Link Eastern Freeway with Kingdom of the Mole Men

Roads Minister Tim Pallas has announced that studies will continue to assess the viability of linking the Eastern Freeway with CityLink via a proposed tunnel. The tunnel will run from Collingwood to Flemington, under the Melbourne General Cemetery and via a lost underground civilization of cave-dwelling mole men.

“This is a practical, real-world solution to Melbourne’s traffic problems,” declared  Pallas. “There are a lot of people out there who would like to see us pursue all sorts of fantasy-land proposals, like train lines to Cranbourne East and South Morang, or peak hour trains less than 20 minutes apart on the Upfield Line. But we aren’t interested in dreams. We are interested in feasible solutions, like the Collingwood – Moletopia – Flemington link.”

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Second Thoughts About Secondary Consent

In last month’s Planning News, Andrew Clarke raised a number of questions that had confronted him while sorting through the case law regarding amendments to plans and permits. That article highlighted the tendency of the planning system to make hard work of what should be simple matters: I suspect the seemingly arcane quandaries he mentioned will be familiar to many practising statutory planners. At the centre of many of those difficulties is the issue of secondary consent: the amendment of plans not through Section 72 of the Act, but by acting upon flexibility built into the conditions of permits. It is supposed to be the simpler option, a shortcut that saves time compared to the path laid out in S.72. However, there is always a danger associated with leaving the marked path: you risk getting lost in the undergrowth. That, unfortunately, is where we now stand with regards to secondary consent.

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When Stanley Met Arthur

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

The popular remembrance of the reception to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is of a generation of hip, pot-addled college students letting the sound and light show wash over them, and then arguing long into the night about the film’s meaning. In 1969 the veteran science fiction writer Harlan Ellison sarcastically complained about acquaintances boring him at 3am with lengthy treatises on the film’s commentary on “the philosophy of the Vedantist movement, and the incredibly brilliant tour de force of Nietzsche-esque subplotting Kubrick pulled off.” Critics’ reviews at the time alternated between those hailing a masterpiece and those deriding the film as a pretentious con.

As much as it would have been fun to have been part of that initial wave of appreciation, looking back it’s hard to see what was so puzzling about 2001. While the film has never quite shaken its reputation for inscrutability, watching it today there’s nothing so mysterious about it. Not only have there been many more genuinely obtuse science fiction films since (starting with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris in 1972), but the basic themes and devices of Kubrick’s film have been so absorbed into the genre that they now seem like familiar standards. Yet 2001 hasn’t been reduced by this process: if anything, that increasing comfort with its message and approach has defused the criticism of those who would dismiss it as a pretentious think-piece. And when we no longer characterise it as a giant-budget art film, it’s easier to appreciate its grandeur on its own terms and also to discern its lasting impact on a wider front.

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First Monster Perspective

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

After all the viral marketing and secrecy, it turns out that there’s nothing that secret about Cloverfield. It’s exactly what it looked like in that original teaser trailer: basically, a giant monster terrorising New York, shot on a handycam by affluent yuppies who must run for their lives. The film is structured as an uninterrupted playback of the full contents of a memory card from a digital video camera; after a brief prelude, it starts with a party as these privileged young New Yorkers prepare to farewell their friend Rob with a surprise party. But then (as we saw in the teaser) there’s a blackout, and a distant explosion, and the head of the statue of liberty lands in their street. Cue running, and screaming, and a fair bit of stomping and biting.

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