art • games • change
Annie, are you OK? Not particularly. I’m out at the Javits Center attending Virtual Worlds 2008 and run into this. Genius.
While the “break glass and use” light sabers showing up in bus stops around NYC are hugely clever and the “Chewbacca: the Original Wingman” ads have a lowbrow appeal, this one has to be my favorite. Hey, maybe I will watch Star Wars for the 2000th time after all.
Boy does this early shot from The Princess and the Frog make me smile. We’ve known for a while that Disney was at work on an animated film with their first black princess, but it’s another thing to see her in the flesh. And it’s nice to see them revive their fine tradition of hand animation (just four years ago they said they were permanently abandoning the technique) for this kind of first.
Of course, the road here has not been without a certain amount of controversy (Disney has been pretty responsive). And lots of questions still remain. Will voodoo be presented in a realistic or stereotypical light? Will the characters find the right balance between overly PC sterility and obnoxious caricature? How will it deal with the racial issues of the time (1920s)? This is a tough one both because it hasn’t been done before and because there are so many eyes on it.
Still, you have to applaud the Mouse House for taking the risk. After all, when you’re designing new characters, the easy road is to stick with what works culturally. We know white characters work. And it sure seems like Disney hasn’t exactly been comfortable with black characters. (I mean how else could you explain Lion King spending an entire film in Africa without ever encountering a person?) Under Disney’s new stewardship (read Pixar), that’s changing. Who better than the folks who gave us the Incredibles’ fabulous Frozone?
Considering Princess and the Frog is set in New Orleans, I hope Disney does it right. Those folks deserve it. I mentioned that Disney is returning to its old animation technique for this film. One could read that as the studio saying: “we wish we had given you a black princess sooner.” If that’s their frame of mind, I imagine things will turn out all right.
Find more Princess and the Frog at Wikipedia and FirstShowing.
New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap in one week (see the trip). Man, I was a vegetable. And that’s what I blame for the moment of weakness that had me sit down and watch a little 2006 movie called Crank one weary night.
Let’s get something out of the way straight away: Crank is moronic. Could a Jason Statham film about a guy given a “high tech Chinese cocktail” that will stop his heart if he doesn’t keep the adrenaline pumping be anything else? (I mean, why not just put a bullet in the guy’s head?)
It’s all guns and explosions and running around in a hospital robe screaming, with nary a plot in sight. It’s boxing matches with a guy who just had his hand severed by an axe. Mindless testosterone pours from every orifice.
But, unfortunately, that’s also what makes it awesome. There’s no pretense, no complex hero backstory, no international intrigue, no damsel in distress. And the visuals have a hyperkinetic cleverness typically reserved for the best music videos. (The bit that conveys a ridiculous crash by showing only shots of the road is worth the price of admission alone.) I haven’t laughed so hard at full velocity senseless violence since Evil Dead 2.
Crank, then, is a special kind of stupid and, well, a special kind of genius, too. Can’t wait to hear more from creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
Watch the trailer and find more Crank at Wikipedia.
How do you know you’re in NYC? You go to see the new Coen brothers movie, it’s on the biggest screen in the house (imax), and it’s sold out bigtime (standing room) — even with Hollywood behemoths like Bee Movie and American Gangster under the same roof. The Coens own this town like few others, and that’s dedication considering they haven’t made a satisfying film in over 10 years.
“It’s a right big mess, ain’t it sheriff?” “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’till the mess gets here.” That early dialog between Tommy Lee Jones and his deputy sums up No Country for Old Men. But mess is what the Coens do best and, though it isn’t quite the triumphant return to early-90’s form I’d hoped for, it certainly is their best movie in a really long time. (I’m a Miller’s Crossing/Barton Fink man myself though I still do have a soft spot for Crimewave — ahh Coens and Raimi together with Brion James.) That’s because, like my favorite non-fiction mystery Capturing the Friedmans, No Country leaves you with as many questions as answers. Fabulously so. The dialog crackles like old times, Javier Bardem is just terrifically evil, and did I mention that nearly every shot is flat gorgeous?
Emerging from the press hubub surrounding the film are some tasty bits about Coens’ secretive process and some lovely images. In a discussion on NPR, Josh Brolin (who would have thought he’d survive that wooden turn in Hollow Man?) explains why working with the Coens is like visiting Mars:
The perception of the Coens is that they’re so quirky, you look at their movies, they’re iconoclasts and they do what they want to do — which is all true — but the reality is that there’s not a lot of talk that goes on on the set. I think all their anxiety goes into who they’re gonna cast, so once they cast you they kind of let it go after we’ve had our initial talks to do what you want to do. But I can’t imagine two directors working together without a fight or an argument or at least “can you please let me finish” but it never happened once. They finish each other’s sentences. If one has an idea, the other will go “okay that’s great let’s try that.” That’s the rarity. That’s the Mars part. (atc)
Considering it’s been so long since the boys from Minnesota made a film up to their old standards, it’s pretty apropos that the Times chose now to do an homage — a great photo set of recreated scenes from their films featuring the original actors. Fun, moody, gorgeously shot stuff that brings back memories of classic movie moments. (article here)
The Coens have always been an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery. But now they’ve made us care again. Just like old times, boys. Arizona rides once more.
Visit No Country for Old Men and find more Coens at Wikipedia
Tekkon Kinkreet has the most stunning realization of an imaginary city I’ve seen since Blade Runner. And that pisses me off. But let’s start from the beginning.
A film adaptation of the underground hit manga Black & White, Tekkon Kinkreet (a Japanese pun on steel reinforced concrete and deep relationships) will have your jaw on the floor from the first frame and pretty much never lets up. Treasure City is flat out gorgeous and just teems with architectural detail that at once feels whimsical yet quite real. When the camera moves through the world, you want to savor every second. As far as environmental design goes, the production just nails it.
And, honestly, the city really has to breathe for the movie to work since the entire story hinges on it. In typical anime mumbo-jumbo, the story goes like this:
Black and White, two street urchins, battle an array of old-word Yakuza and alien assassins vying to rule the decaying metropolis of Treasure Town - where the moon smiles and young boys can fly. (imdb)
Despite how it sounds, the narrative sticks surprisingly close to earth. Contrast that with Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which also visited the US this year. Where Paprika’s fantastic environs led it off the deep end in the last quarter of the film, Tekkon’s do much the opposite — they ground it. Giving much more would ruin things, but let’s just say TK feels closer to Satoshi’s more intimate (and better) film Tokyo Godfathers.
So, what pissed me off? Well, I had the chance to see Tekkon in the theater. Heck, I have a photo to prove it. But I slacked off (well, I saw the even more elusive Colma instead) and I’m now left wondering how those massive vistas might play on the big screen. Considering the box office take, it seems like I’ll likely never know. Bugger.
Find more Tekkon Kinkreet at Sony Pictures and peek behind the scenes at PingMag.
Brian DePalma got into quite the public yelling match at the New York Film Festival this week. You see, the producers of Brian’s new film Redacted edited it against his will. Specifically, they put black bars over the eyes of folks in some very central, very real photographs presented therein, claiming the victims’ relatives could sue. DePalma accused them of being tools of the man. And that opened up the whole can of worms regarding use of war photography, stretching back to My Lai and beyond.
On The Media has a fascinating back-and-forth on the subject with legal scholar James Boyle. Discussion of the suppression of the JFK autopsy images and the Challenger space shuttle audio lead to the following exchange:
OTM: These were huge news stories. Why were they protected?
Boyle: Well, I think the argument was that hearing the pain and confusion and fear of people who were about to die adds nothing to the political debate.
OTM: But isn’t that the point of these photographs in DePalma’s case? Misery, fear, mayhem, horror — the very things that have been censored about this war. How can you on the one hand prevent that stuff on that basis and then permit it on the very same basis?
Boyle: If the whole NPR thing doesn’t work out, Brooke, you have a career as a lawyer. I would say that the answer there is that we knew the astronauts on the space shuttle, we knew that they died and it was an awful set of moments. I think that the answer here is that the pain of the Iraqis has not been making it to our screens, has not been making it to our newspapers. I think the claim here is Mr. DePalma is saying this is a necessary political comment.
Of course the question then becomes: what is relevant to the debate and what is just morbid curiosity and, well, what is just there for its entertainment value. Does DePalma’s film have more in common with JFK’s elaborate mythmaking or United 93’s meticulous fact checking? It seems the early critics are coming in right down the middle. Either way, it looks like Hollywood is going to take more than one high-profile stab at the Wag the Dog nightmare in Iraq. Surely we can all hope there is some way to honor the memories of those lost even as popular culture uses their images to raise awareness but, if the Redacted mess makes anything clear, it’s that balance sure ain’t easy.
Hear the whole Boyle interview (and Brian DePalma, too) at On The Media and visit the Redacted website.
Found object: floating castle. Photos of a mysterious levitated structure that looks straight out of a fantasy film showed up recently, and much speculation followed. Where was it? Was it a sculpture? Had the photoshop corps been at work again?
Some judicious automated translator banging (most of the conversation is in Russian, Spanish, and Ukranian) yielded a few tidbits. The photographer, for example, says it was dismantled in May of this year. And it was in Ukraine. Archinect says it’s the remains of “bunker for the overload of mineral fertilizers.”
But what I find most interesting are the connections people made between the structure and film worlds created by Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and, most often, Hayao Miyazaki — particularly Howl’s Moving Castle. I never quite understood what went on in that film. (A couple friends from Japan didn’t either, so I’m guessing it’s not a cultural thing.) Still, the characters and the world were so strong that it nearly didn’t matter.
And the fact that so many want to see Miyazaki’s world in the real one says something about the places his films create. Lots of animated films let us escape into wonderful imaginary places. But there’s something special about Miyazaki’s movies that makes the real world seem more wonderful, too.
Find alternate angles and multilingual conversation at panoramio. Thanks to ffffound.
Ever heard of Colma? Population 1.5 million; only 1,191 alive. With stats like that, Colma is literally Deadsville, USA. And that’s the backdrop for… a musical? Indeed — one that I didn’t want to end. And I hate musicals.
Rich Wong’s Colma: The Musical sometimes feels like a student film. But that’s precisely what makes it awesome. Shot on a shoestring, it opens with a lo-fi number featuring cheesy keyboards and the not-so-steady cam. Minutes in, though, you can’t help but submit to its slacker charm. The characters (Billy, Rodel, Maribel) don’t feel so much written as playing themselves. There’s something about the understated charm of characters who fall so far outside Hollywood stereotype that they feel like someone you know. And their post high-school doldrums are immediately relatable. It might be a little angsty, but it also feels real.
It’s the kind of film that’ll set a musical number to the obnoxious pulsing of a car alarm (”car alarm karaoke”) and in the next instant features some truly thoughtful discussion of what it means to have graduated high school fully expecting the rest of your life to be spelled out only to discover you are more lost than ever, in a dead-end suburb — able to see the skyscrapers of San Francisco, but feeling so far away from anywhere. It’s at once cynical and giddy. And poetic when you least expect it.
While most of the songs will stick in your head for weeks (H.P. Mendoza rocks!), a couple fall flat. And not every subplot quite flies, either. But it’s just that imperfection that makes Colma work. The filmmakers seem, in some ways, to be in the same quandary as the characters: showing flashes of brilliance, falling down, finding their way back, singing their lungs out. And their songs hit home more than most because they clearly come from someplace genuine. How many movie musicals can say that?
Colma comes out of nowhere and will have you smiling for weeks. It’s clear that Mendoza and Wong are at just the beginning of very promising careers. L.A. Renigen (Maribel) is quite a find as well. As much as the movie is about leaving Colma, I didn’t want to.
[Watch the Trailer] For more, visit Colma: The Musical and Colma, CA
China’s Three Gorges Dam will displace over 1.2 million people and put a massive swath of land underwater. But it won’t happen all at once. And in the in-between, there’s a strange kind of limbo for those who live there — between places not quite lost but soon-to-be and an uncertain future bearing down as sure as the water rises.
It’s this dramatic backdrop that Jia Zhang Ke chooses for his understated, gorgeously shot film Still Life (Sanxia Haoren). We watch the loosely intertwined stories of Sanming and Tao as they search for the past (a daughter, a husband) before the water washes away all trace. The metaphor works and it’s used to heartbreaking effect in a scene where Sanming arrives at the last known address for his family only to find it long submerged. You feel the quiet rumble of history in every frame — waterline marks written on buildings as if to say: next week, everything you remember will be underwater. But there are light moments, too. An elderly innkeeper entertainingly chastises a government worker for “rudely” marking his hotel “OK for Demolition” and a certain character’s fixation on Chow Yun Fat never gets old.
When I sailed through the Three Gorges last year, I saw lovely old villages being torn down brick by brick and shining modern cities built just across the river, the new cities perched in places that seem unreasonably high, but will soon be at river’s edge. The stunning scale of the project was driven home over and over. But what I missed was the human story: what this kind of change does to the people that live there, their families, and their dreams. Still Life is that story. It captures people at a singular moment in history in a place that, once lost, can never be regained. We see the lives of poor demolition workers and the camaraderie they develop in the ruins, we see the lives of the rich construction contractors and the impressive engineering feats of the New China, we see luminous celluloid jam packed with gorgeously lit conversation and culture. I felt like I was back in China, this time as an insider, a local.
But as close as you feel to the place and the characters, you slowly realize you aren’t just watching a beautifully composed film set against a dramatic backdrop but a historical document of a time that will not come again. After all, most of the locations shot in the film are now underwater. And the film quietly wonders if things aren’t better left that way.
Still Life is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this Friday and Saturday. It won tops in Venice. Find more at Memento Films and grab the presskit.
We last wrote about China’s tomorrow in Future Found.
Bamako is not what it seems. Abderrahmane Sissako’s lyrical, angry film puts the IMF and World Bank on trial for crimes against Africa, quite literally. And that trail happens in lead character Melé’s back yard in Mali. If that sounds strange, it is. But you’ll forgive it because the testimony is so compelling, and that testimony is often matched with camera moves through a beautifully colorful Malian village with women washing clothes, children crying and laughing, men having afternoon tea. It brought back strong warm memories from my time in Africa.
But the key to Bamako really is in the disconnect between the fully formal court proceedings and a backyard setting that’s anything but. Midway through the film, a wedding winds its way down the court’s middle isle and interrupts the proceedings full-bore. It’s a joyous, singing celebration and the way it’s presented is so rich, but so out of place amidst stilted court formalities that it seems almost like a dream. And that was the hint that finally brought the film into focus.
The reason the trial happens in a place that’s deeply interwoven with all aspects of Malian community is that the trial is the dream, not the wedding, not the washer women, not Melé’s backyard. It’s the collective dream of everyone in the community, from Melé’s sick daughter to the elder griot who chomps at the bit to say his piece — each understanding the dream on a different level and in their own way. A collective wish of a village, a country, a continent.
When I looked at Bamako through that lens, it made sense. The beautiful kind of sense that puts a smile on your face when your mind’s eye presents a dream so fully realized. And the crushing kind of sense that knows it’s a dream that will never come to pass.
Bamako has been held over at Film Forum and it seems to keep selling out. Let’s hope that’s a good sign for wider distribution.
You are currently browsing the microscopiq weblog archives for the Film category.
Subscribe
Recent Comments
11 Comments
2 Comments
162 Comments
5 Comments
2 Comments
6 Comments
2 Comments