I LOVE Yellow Submarine. Loooooooove Yellow Submarine. I'm old enough to remember The Beatles upending New York, which remains a pivotal cultural memory of mine. I dove in all the way, too, including my golden, gleaming Yellow Submarine lunchbox, 1968's de rigeur fashion accessory.
(That one's not mine. I wish. I've watched ebay, Beatlebay, Christie's, and others, and have never seen one for sale in even GOOD condition. Most are pretty well banged up and rusted, and still run in the $700 range...if you can find one at all.)
So maybe I'm too close to it to be objective, but I'm not sure I'm ready for Robert Zemeckis to apply the same 3D motion capture technique he used for "The Polar Express" the upcoming "A Christmas Carol" (starring Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey, respectively, in multiple roles), and "Beowulf," to be applied to a new stereoscopic 3D version of Yellow Submarine.
I'll be honest, the Carrey picture looks wonderful, but I found the other two a little disturbing. In fairness, I (stupidly) didn't see them in IMAX 3D, so I'm not exactly giving them a fair shake. The 2D version is the equivalent of foreign language dubbing...but still.
On one hand, whenever I hear about somebody revisiting The Beatles, I think of Robert Stigwood's "Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band," starring Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees. (What's that? You thought The Bee Gees had top billing? No way, man. Frampton. Look it up.)
That was 1978. I LIKE Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees, and there were some genuinely good performances in it that stand the test of time, notably Earth Wind & Fire's "Got To Get You Into My Life" and Aerosmith's "Come Together." Despite the best efforts of these and many other talented people, 1978 was an AWFUL year to be a Beatle fan. I felt like I had to hide.
Until 1978 became a WONDERFUL year to be a Beatles fan. one the kindest, sweetest, most generous and humane movies ever made, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," told the tale of a handful of teens doing their best to see The Beatles live in the Ed Sullivan Theater on Feb. 9, 1964. The movie isn't about that show, or about Beatlemania. The fact is that no movie can adequately capture how big The Beatles were, and this one doesn't try. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" shows how The Beatles reached beyond the hype, and touched the lives and hearts of these particular people.
Instead of running to hide from an awful movie, I now felt like I had to run to tell everyone what a wonderful movie this is.
And, as you can see there at the bottom, co-written by, and directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Hmmm, all of a sudden, I'm not quite so worried about him redoing "Yellow Submarine."
"I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was groundbreaking in one small way, and two big ones. The small one is that it was the first movie to show the intimate side of fandom -- including the competition among fans to prove oneself "the BIGGEST fan." It showed in a compassionate and empathetic way the way that identifying with a performer changes your own identity, and in this case, for the better. I certainly feel that way about my own Beatles fandom, and I'm certain Mr. Zemeckis does too.
More broadly, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was the first movie to mingle historical events and footage with narrative storytelling on this scale. (He certainly did a bit of it in "Forrest Gump" a bit later.)
It was also the first movie to entirely immerse itself in music. You can take music out of virtually any picture where music played a pivotal role or strongly underscored the cinematic experience -- "Singin' In The Rain," "Blackboard Jungle," "Apocalypse Now" -- and they wouldn't be all that different as movies. You wouldn't even have to swap out the songs for something else. Just take 'em out, and reflow the edit. No biggie.
Without these particular songs, there is no "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." It could possibly be done, but only as a stunt. To tell this real story, you need these real songs -- all 17 of 'em -- by these real performers.
So anyway, if anybody is going to do anything with The Beatles in a movie, I can't think of anybody better than Robert Zemeckis. I'm also not going to be an idiot: I'm going to see this one in IMAX 3D. I encourage you, likewise, to accept no substitutes.
+++
Gratuitous multimedia:
1) The Yellow Submarine 6-sheet. Found this in a UK poster collection. Sorry they didn't have an image any bigger than this to show it, but this bad boy is 81 inches by 81 inches!
The Beatles as "The Forces of Good." Check. Screenplay by Erich Segal, author of "Love Story." Check.
2) The original Yellow Submarine trailer
3) The Robert Stigwood Sgt. Pepper Trailer
Notes: Trailers used to be a lot longer than they are today, eh? The good news is that this covers a whole lot of my favorite imagery from the movie. Bad news for anybody who thought that The Beatles were actually in the movie!
See? I told you it was bad. And that Peter Frampton had top billing.
4) Although this last clip is from December 1967, Jimi Hendrix added "Sgt. Pepper" to his show the week the album was released on June 1 of that year. (Yes, I remembered that off the top of my head. I can allllmost remember my own birthday, but I'll never forget this date.) This was much to the amazement of The Beatles, and to the consternation of the rest of the English music scene, who had yet another aspect of Jimi's talent to humble them.
Seriously, if you're going to don Sgt. Pepper garb and sing a Beatles tune, watch and learn. As the man says, "Watch out for your ears."
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Sep 4, 2009 at 11:39:02 am
One of my favorite Netflix features is that you can stream movies in your queue. Add this one to your queue so that you can start streaming it to your computer right now: Henry Poole Is Here. The trailer's vibe makes it seem wacky...but it's not. The music is all wrong, NOTHING like the music in the movie. But it might still give you some idea: it's slow, quiet, lyrical, a little sad, and very sweet, about what you might find at the end of your rope.
And you can start streaming it now.
I gotta tell you. We've really gotten into the two of us, watching movies gathered close around the laptop in bed. You can't do it ALL the time, but it's very intimate. This is the perfect movie for that.
While it's not streaming, this next one is a picture with a similar slow, sweet vibe. Again, the music is all wrong - the score is by Michael Penn, and gorgeous. So are the shots - gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, which the trailer gives absolutely no sense of. But again, hopefully, a little sense that this reaches way past cliches, way past the pain, into building something new and real.
We watched this one on the big screen (REALLY big - a 100-inch front projection system), but still a very, very intimate picture.
(The big screen ain't just about me, btw. Every time we've moved, my wife wouldn't even consider a house that doesn't enough throw-room for a projector. She bought one of those laser measuring thingies to make it easier to figure out.)
That streaming Netflix thing really is off the hook. As you might guess from other of my entries, I'm not buying the Blu-ray hype...but the built-in Netflix streaming in many newer models is tempting enough that my wife said it's time for us to start looking around at our player options. (Ah, that's my girl!)
So anyway, two movies that will reaffirm your faith in life, in love, and in moviemaking.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54:51 am
More specifically, a review of the rapidly emerging news about the slice of nerd-vana that may or may not be named Tron 2.
Those of us who became devoted some classics of science fiction filmmaking between, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1977 and 1983, have reasons to cast the stink eye in the direction of latter-day sequels, prequels and such. One of those classics is 1982’s “Tron,” and you don’t need me to explain why.
Yet even in this post-stink-eye era, the word on its sequel is nothing but good so far – including the news that it’s being shot in stereoscopic 3D. As soon as you hear that, your reaction is probably the same as mine – how could it NOT be?
Details have been coming fast of late, so it seems a good time to review where we are so far. Let’s start with a wonderful a bootleg clip of the trailer from 2008’s Comic Con. The quality is pretty nasty, because it’s, well, a bootleg. The clip itself drags a bit (less a well-paced trailer than a look at the “look” of the movie so far, I think), but you can definitely see where they were at the time.
The art and science of the final release will of course be light years (har har) ahead of this, but so far, so good!
A few things to note:
This is still online! Disney is notoriously protective of its properties, yet here this clip remains. I think they get that this barely embryonic footage is worth something, and was, after all shown publicly. I doubt any mercy will be shown for leaks…or to leakers…from here on.
I got chills hearing the roars of approval when the light cars, and especially Jeff Bridges, appear on screen. Even without the pictures, I’d have gotten chills just hearing it.
(Here’s an interview in The Guardian that includes some of Jeff’s very endearing enthusiasm for the project.)
No Bruce Boxleitner in the trailer? No worries. He didn’t sign on until later in 2008, although he’s still listed as “rumored” on IMDb.
It was at the time of the trailer called “TR2N.” Cool-looking, yes, but virtually unpronounceable.
The name has changed a few other times, but IMDB suggests that we may have landed on Tron 2.0 for now. I'm not convinced. Disney released a videogame called “Tron 2.0” in 2003.
It was generally well-received -- both the hardcore game nerds and the gen pop give it roughly a B -- but Disney seems like a creative-enough bunch to come up with a unique name. Indeed, reports as recent as a few weeks ago have said that the title is in fact NOT set. Read on for details.
Did I mention the roars of approval? That for me is the big takeaway from the trailer.
One of the first questions to come up is, who’s involved? One sign of the project’s legitimacy is the presence of Steve Lisberger, who directed and wrote the story for the original, now here as a writer and consultant. Here’s a wonderful intervie... with Lisberger, as well as the best discussion I've seen of the showing of the trailer at Comic Con.
Something to be truly excited about is that two of the screenwriters, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have done quite a bit of heavy lifting as both writers and producers for television’s “Lost,” my vote for richest storytelling in the history of the medium, by a pretty long shot.
The key name is of course the director, Joseph Kosinski. A speedy look at his IMDb profile shows…nothing, except a pre-production credit for Logan’s Run. To be released in 2010, sez IMDb?! I don’t think so! (Although it turns out that Kosinski did in fact sign to do “Logan’s Run” first.) And no mention of Kosinski at Wikipedia!
I'd actually heard of him a couple of years before he signed on for Tron, when me and millions of other folks were bowled over by his commercial for Gears of War. Hit the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.
I was actually a little skeptical about the Tron sequel before I found out that the guy who did THAT was directing the movie! And while you may be skeptical about a commercial director taking on Tron for his first feature, I've put together some of his spots and other shorts that relate to what he might be up to with Tron, and some of the striking things he has to say about it. You'll love it. Even if you'd never heard of Tron, Kosinski is one of the most creative people you'll have come across in a long, long time.
In the meantime, here are some more of stories that have put the Tron sequel back in the news of late. First comes this article at /film the week before last, featuring the first picture of a costumed actor. Later that day, a picture from the set in Vancouver, standing in for New York City.
(I’m only including a few photos from the articles I link to at /film. It’s a great resource for folks tracking stories like this for the entire “reel world” that you should check out.)
The fella who sent in the picture is breathless with wonder:
“I was in total awe of how much equipment and gadgets they had. Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last five days is easily some of the most expensive stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s probably is $300 million, even if it’s canadian dollars.”
(Presumably written by an American who hasn’t noticed that the US dollar is getting its ass handed to it by the Canadian dollar…although because they’re Canadian, they’re doing it very, very politely.)
It took Disney only 3 days to tell us that the budget of Tron 2.0 is NOT approaching $300 million, a figure that had also been mentioned in the Vancouver Sun.
In reporting that debunking, /film includes a picture of a camera, and some tantalizing tech details:
“[‘Benjamin Button’ cinematographer Claudio] Miranda has challenged his crew with the task of having all the flexibility of standard 2D cameras including ambitious use of shots as well as Steadicam in 3D.” … “Amongst other setups, we will be rigging an F-35 to a GF-8 crane and Mini-Scorpio head to get a bird’s eye view out over the night streets of Vancouver.”
Remember the stereoscopic part? I recently had a chance to speak to John Daro at FotoKem, where a number of recent stereo smashes have been posted. He was speaking generally about stereo 3D DI…most definitely NOT about Tron, I promise…but he gave me insights into how the Sony F35 CineAlta camera works for stereo features.
Quite a bit of footage from the F35 crosses his desk, most of it shot at 1920x1080, 4:2:2, recorded at 880 mbps to the Sony SRW-1 HDCAM tape recorder that you can see prominently docked to the back of the F35.
Yes, tape. There’s a ton of it out there, even for high-end digital cinema. And yes, 1920x1080. As Russell Lasson noted in 21st Century Cinema for Creative COW Magazine, virtually all digital cinema is 2K, and as Panavision’s John Galt noted for us in The Truth About 2K, 4K, and The Future of Pixels, the majority of 2K is shot at 1920x1080. Even the Academy aperture for a 2K scan is only 1728 pixels.
So don’t get your panties in a wad about the Tron sequel or anything else being shot at 1980 for the big screen. You’ve already seen a ton of movies shot this way.)
At 4:2:2 for a stereo 3D shoot, the SRW-1 takes two HD-SDI feeds, and records them to a single tape: left-eye/right-eye for frame one, left-eye/right-eye for frame two, etc. John digitizes via the Sony SRW 5800 into the Quantum Pablo, which splits out two separate streams in real time as it digitizes.
The SRW-1 records only – only! – a single stream of 4:4:4. Shooting that way would of course call for a dedicated deck for each eye.
So if the report about shooting Tron 2.0 is accurate, that’s almost certainly how it’s being recorded. In any case, John will be going into much, more detail on the 3D DI post process for the upcoming Stereoscopic Issue of Creative COW Magazine.
Another recent report about Tron 2.0 is that it will be scored by the masked electronica dance duo known as Daft Punk.
With the original scored by the iconic Wendy Carlos, they have as much to live up to as anybody involved in the production of Tron 2.0. They can be cheesy – not necessarily a bad thing in this context – but I think they’re a great choice.
The most-viewed Daft Punk clip I found is this bit of genius by a youngster named Austin Hall, set to their song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” also known in this permutation as “Daft Hands.”
The uber-geeks at Ain’t It Cool News got an updated report on the plot in the last few weeks, which you can take a couple of ways. One is that, far from being mere fanboys, the team at AICN have established themselves as a genuine force to be reckoned with. For example, site founder Harry Knowles emailed James Cameron about some of the “Avatar” rumors he’d been hearing, and Cameron replied.
So this wouldn’t be the first time that AICN has had info leaked to them...sometimes from official sources, intending to whip up a storm. It also wouldn’t be the first time that a studio has leaked something substantially true, but with important details obscured. And as the author points out, anything can change over the next two years. But his one rings true.
You can find plenty of other good stuff at AICN (as well as some adult language – step gingerly). I've been following it since early web adopter Roger Ebert – whose site remains one of the web’s great film resources -- pointed us to AICN back in 1996, when it was just Harry Knowles and his father. (Harry also co-hosted “At the Movies” with Roger a few times.)
And this story includes the news that the name of the movie is not Tron 2, but “something with a colon."
This week they've also posted another exterior shot from Vancouver this week. Below is greatly reduced from the original.
As with the other photos we’ve seen so far, admittedly not much to see, but trainspotters will note that this is in fact another train, and that it has indeed been spotted.
This little summary is far from complete, but it’s enough to catch you up on where we are so far. For more perspective on this news, especially on director Joseph Kosinski, see here.
PS. In an article for Creative COW Magazine, CGI pioneer Steve Wright tells how the effects in Tron actually set the industry back!
This is the sidebar in an article in on how commercials were actually the driving force in widespread adoption of CGI. Pretty slick stuff, and well worth a look.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 26, 2009 at 9:48:02 am
In my Monday-morning breakdown of the numbers after the opening weekend of Monsters vs. Aliens, I noted a disproportionate share of the dough coming from 3D screens:
$58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
.03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross!
Now, IMAX is a name you know. Until very recently, it has been synonymous with big-screen stereoscopic projection. Really, it's the first major brand in this space.
Here's the next brand to watch: RealD. Right now, they make the 3D systems used by roughly 90% of the installed screens. (The other big name besides IMAX: our pals at Dolby. But that's another story, and I'll get to it soon.)
RealD recently announced that their specific slice of the pie was a big one: over $25 million of the total take came from screens using their systems.
The 3D screen rollout has obviously slowed, for obvious reasons...and there are equally obvious reasons why someone might want to sign up for one of these screens anyway: there's obviously money to be made. Of course, if everything obvious was true, or everything true was obvious....well, you get the point.
In any case, look for more from RealD soon, right here at your friendly neighborhood COW.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 19, 2009 at 6:46:40 pm
Jeffry Katzenberg has been a major advocate of stereoscopic 3D for a while. The first place I saw him talk about it was ShoEast in 2007, a gathering of eastern US movie theater owners and operators. The talk was called "The Future of 3D in the Digital Age," and it was among the places that he said that all of Dreamworks' animated features would be released as stereoscopic.
On one count, he underestimated how quickly this would come to pass: he said that there would be "5, 6 or 7 'Super-A' titles" in 2009, 12 to 18 by 2010. So far this year, we've already seen My Bloody Valentine, the Jonas Brothers concert movie, Henry Selick's "Coraline," and just this weekend, "Aliens vs. Monsters," with 10 more slated for release this summer.
Here's the first trailer for Aliens vs. Monsters, which first ran in 3D during the Super Bowl:
Here's the second trailer:
Here's the third. Not sure why YouTube won't let me embed the high-quality version, but it's worth following the link to take a gander.
The next biggie is going to be Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
(You can see Entertainment Weekly's preview of the year's 3D releases here, but it's worth trying to track down the print issue, which includes anagplypic stills from most of those features, along with 3D glasses to view 'em. Pretty slick. It also doesn't have much to say about James Cameron's Avatar, opening in December...but I sure will later.)
So for the pace of "Super 'A'" releases, we're well ahead of schedule.
As theater owners pushed back on Katzenberg in 2007, they said that upgrading screens was going to be way, way too expensive. His reply was that they'd make more money on 3D showings, and this week's premiere of "Monsters vs. Aliens" certainly bore that out. Here's how the numbers broke down:
$58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
.03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross! (Again to be exact, $5.2 million, a record.)
To put it another way, 28.3% of the screens accounted for nearly 70% of the money that Av.M pulled in! That is, as the kids say, off the hizz-OOOK! (Actually, I doubt any kids say that anymore.) There's absolutely no question that Katzenberg is being proved right on feature after feature.
However, here's one area he was a little optimistic on: he predicted 6000 3D-equipped screens by March 2009. The number is more like 2000 in the US, with a smattering more overseas. Let's be generous and call it halfway there.
The good news is that there are a total of 8000 screens "committed" (see previous link)...but as far as I can tell, no particular timetable.
When I say 8000 screens, the vast majority are those offered by RealD. Dolby is late to the party, but has a few hundred screens committed, mostly in Europe. The draw is that they don't require a new screen, and sell their gear outright. RealD requires new screens and collects royalties....but c'mon, seriously now, RealD has it locked up. Although as far as overall revenues, all signs point to Katzenberg being exactly right: the real money is in 3D exhibition.
It's true now. It's going to get truer. Expect more details.
In the meantime, our stereoscopic 3D coverage is going to be a wild ride that you're not going to want to miss. If you don't already subscribe, now's a good time to start.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 31, 2009 at 8:07:06 am
This isn't just huge news for people in the digital cinema business: it's huge for everyone in any aspect of show business, including slobs like us.
I saw the news of Sony's new 4K projectors on the front page of Variety.com.
Variety is barely peripherally related to the projection side of the business. This message is directly aimed at the people who make the movies: 4K is here...and the ideal use of a 4K projector is NOT the projection of 4K images. Its primary intent is for a full 2K for eacheye!! You can kind of get that from the last frame of the animated ad that you can see in the grab above -- and, uhm, the name of the product. The first 2 frames of the animation are even more on the nose, but in case there's any doubt, I saved you the effort of typing in the link to Sony's site as posted at Variety:
And just today (March 30 as I write this) our pals at AMC -- the same ones who committed to 1500 RealD screens just yesterday -- have announced a "commitment in principle" to add 5000 Sony 4K digital cinema systems. They've already rolled out 150 screens at 11 theaters, and 29 of them are 3D-capable. Now it seems to me that dang near every new screen going in should be 3D-capable, and it looks like the next ones will be (at least in principle). I have no idea how this fits in with yesterday's announcement between AMC and RealD, but that's not my problem.
Except, if I'm going to keep writing about stereoscopic production and projection, it kind of IS my problem. This is insane. AMC has movies to show. I have movies (and TV) to watch, and frankly, other things to do. It's clear that there are going to be new 3D announcements more or less every day of the week. I ain't making any promises, but I'll try to at least pass along some the biggest.
Several things to note:
--That Sony intends this projector primarily for the stereoscopic projection of 2K images (that is, one for each eye) lines up exactly with what we reported from both Panavision's Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging, John Galt (below), and The COW's own Russell Lasson, that 2K is where it's at for digital cinema. (John talks about deployment here, and Russell talks about actually posting 2K for digital cinema here.)
--Not that practical 4K projection isn't perhaps coming. But I don't see the existing thousands of 2K digital cinema projectors upgrading, nor do I think they should.
--One of the big draws of these digital cinema projectors is that they provide an experience that can't be duplicated at home. Here's the problem with that argument: I've seen people actually putting 4K projectors in their home theaters since the year 2000 AND FRAKING FIVE.
There are a ton of great reasons to sign up for an account at the AV Science Forum (aka AVS.com), not least of which is to read stories like this one, of a real-life installation, first reported in January 2006. I'm pretty sure you'll need an account to read the story (the usual name & email form/email activation link), but here's a photo of our happy owner:
You can also read reviews of the Sony CineAlta SRX-R220 and Meridian 810 (pictured below) 4K projectors in HOME THEATER MAGAZINE last year.
--A Creative COW programming note: smack in the middle of the Variety front page pictured above is a note that, after dangling over the precipice almost since the day it first aired 3 seasons ago, "Saturday Night Lights" has been given a 2-year, 26-episode commitment. This isn't just a big deal for fans of quality television, but for The COW's own Todd McMullen, a camera operator on that show. He told a couple of great stories about it, as well as a career that began on Martin Scorcese's Casino (!!! Talk about starting on a high note!), in Creative COW Magazine's Film Values issue. Here's the online version of his article.
I love his thoughts on Cinematic Style. Short version: it ain't shooting at 24P or adding a filter in FCP:
To me cinematic style is big and ballsy. A shot that makes the viewer look at it and think about it. It's tough to explain, but the norm just isn't as interesting to me.
I like to go for what's not normal, especially with composition and lighting. I love a long lens profile shot. I like having foregrounds in a shot, especially a master. I prefer having the camera low, looking somewhat up. I like dolllies and cranes when it makes sense, although most of the time it doesn't. I also like the reverse over, basically, coverage from behind the actors.
And I really like it when a director wants to cover a whole scene in one camera move. Good stuff.
Now, you can't have all this for every shot, but I try to make a frame as interesting as possible. Because, for me, the story is in the surroundings. It isn't always told through the words.
--Well, I've once again veered off topic, so here I'll veer back on. The fact is that there's no clear home standard for stereoscopic viewing. Here's what the world leader in theatrical stereo viewing has to say on home viewing: "We are already working with top consumer electronics manufacturers to bring these new technologies to fruition in the highest possible quality. Please keep checking this space for updates!" In other words, nada. Bupkes. No soup for you. Nice picture though - check it out. That'll have to do for now.
--Except for the two-color glasses, of course. No need to settle for the cheap, cardboard ones. You can get really snazzy ones at Amazon.
Of course, there are two different sets of colors for these anaglyphic glasses, and they're not compatible. At $3 a pair, it's hardly a platform war, but it also barely hints at some of the issues confronting home viewing. But that's another post.
Hey, and it turns out that there's some huge breaking news on that front that came down just today. Patience, patience. I'll get to it soon. After I've had a long nap.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 30, 2009 at 8:37:55 pm
I like award season, year-end lists and all that. There's so much that goes on in the year, much of it frankly much more important than entertainment, that it's easy to forget some of the great stuff we've seen, heard, and read. And in the scheme of things, there's not that much that's THAT much more important than entertainment, is there? :-)
I hope to get around to other categories, but I've been thinking about movies. Oscar nominations get announced this week, and as I've mentioned before, the Oscars are as close to a holiday as my wife and I celebrate, so I'll start with movies.
In Bruges Even though this was only (only!) my second-favorite movie of the year, I was inspired to write this column by the fact that both of the lead actors were nominated for Golden Globes. Even though I've never liked him in a movie before, I was delighted that Colin Farrel won a Golden Globe for his part in this remarkable story.
It's got enough profanity and enough accidental violence that it suggest what might be possible if Tarantino had a really gentle touch because he was so sentimental....but who wants Tarantino to be gentle and sentimental? But it's so original that, rather than compare it to anybody else, I'll say that the comedy gives way to a careful meditation on ethics, responsibility, honor, sacrifice, and the hope and redemption found in the best relationships.
Did I mention that I'm no Farrel fan? But in this, he was funny, warm and ultimately heartbreaking, definitely deserving of his Best Actor Golden Globe. I can't imagine anyone else having won...with the exception of his co-star Brendan Gleeson. How cool is that the two leads of a very small independent feature are both nominated for such a prestigious award! And how full of integrity that the producers didn't throw Gleeson into the supporting category to give him possibly a better shot. (More about that later.)
Mostly, I wish they both could have won. In fact, Ralph Fiennes should have won a Best Supporting Actor award for his role in this. I've never seen him better.
So even if you hate two of the actors and have never heard of the third, stop whining. See the movie. You'll see I'm right on all counts.
This is actually just about the second best movie I've seen in the last COUPLE of years. I've already seen it 4 times, and will be watching it again later today. LOVE that HD DVR my friends.
The Visitor The best movie I saw this year, and the last several.
Richard Jenkins is one of those "oh yeah, THAT guy" actors, most notably as the dead father in Six Feet Under. He wasn't in every episode, and as a ghost, didn't always have much to do. But he was featured in an episode called The Room, perhaps the best hour of TV I've ever seen. Absolutely indelible.
The Visitor was another small indie movie about a widowed man who sees the end of his life much more clearly than his life now, which he also recognizes as empty in every way you can imagine. It's sweet, and quiet, and deeply human, as some things fall apart, and others are put together in surprising ways.
It turns out that the writer/director Tom McCarthy created this part with Jenkins in mind -- absolutely understandable if you'd seen The Room, I swear. This was Tom's second picture. The first was another understated gem, The Station Agent...which he wrote for lead actor Peter Dinklage.
Anyway, Richard said that this was the role of a lifetime, and it would have been no less true if the film hadn't been written for him.
The tragedy: that The Visitor was such a small film, so early in the year, that Jenkins is an incredibly long shot to even be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. He should win.
The good news: he has been nominated for 4 other major awards, including the Independent Spirit Award. He was given a special award by one critics association for "Best Year," for his roles in this, Burn After Reading, The Broken, The Tale of Despereaux, and Step Brothers. (A pretty good year.) It was Step Brothers star Will Ferrell who suggested Jenkins to the producers. They agreed that he was the guy, and held up the production until he was available.
A remarkable guy. A remarkable movie.
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. Even after all the hub-bub about what an amazing performance he gave, I still wasn't prepared for how good it was. I'm just going to leave it at that: however good you've heard he was as The Joker, he was much, much better. I think you have to go back to Cagney to find such a compelling anti-hero.
Not my favorite scene, but the only one I could find an individual clip for:
But here's the thing: he's nominated as Best SUPPORTING Actor, which is ridiculous. He's on screen more than Batman! I'm glad he's going to win (which I say with absolute certainty before the nominations are even announced), but it still ain't right. Some other actor in what really IS a supporting role is going to get shut out, and that's a shame.
As long as it isn't Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, who many believe might win. I liked that movie more than I thought I would, but all that fuss about Tom Cruise as a foul-mouthed movie exec in makeup and a fat suit? Yawn. I really do think obnoxiousness and obscenity can be funny, but this was just tedious.
In any case, re: this Best "Supporting" nonsense, my man Michael Schaefer says "STOP THE OBSCENITY!" A little strongly stated, but he makes a really good case.
Iron Man I think the last Robert Downey Jr. movie I saw was Sixteen Candles. Do you remember him in that? Didn't think so. My point being that I held off seeing Iron Man because I didn't have any particular interest in either character or the actor.
Boy, was I an idiot! (Again.) This is the best comic book movie EVER, by a ridiculous stretch. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give Iron Man a SEVENTY FIVE, and the second best comic book movie ever, The Dark Knight, a SIX. Yeah, I really thought it was that much better. But Heath Ledger was still amazing.
Death at a Funeral Another indie movie, another first time writer, directed by the great Frank Oz. It's a really funny movie about a funeral that runs off the rails. It was a teensy bit squirmy for folks who've just been through a really tough one (my wife's mother passed away what seems like a few weeks ago, but it was late September)...but once it got going, it was impossible not to laugh. HARD.
My point in bringing this up is to mention Oz's commentary, the second best I've ever heard. (The best, now and forever, will be the commentaries on the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) The writer and the funniest of the actors were on one commentary, and it was fun. Frank had his own, though, it was a shimmering wonder. You'll see and hear exactly how he works as a director, and the things you have to juggle to make a movie happen. We found it riveting. It's worth renting the movie for this 94 minute film school.
And for what it's worth, Frank was the voice of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and other Muppets, and you can definitely hear it when he laughs. Which he does a lot. The actors threw him off the set for one scene because he was making it impossible to finish without THEM laughing.
Needless to say, after such an amazing, insightful tour, we were ready to watch it again. Needless to say, we did.
Best commentary, Honorable Mention. While not the second best ever, and dropped to honorable mention because it was from 2007, the two commentaries on The Simpsons Movie were as funny as the movie...which was REALLY funny.
My guess for the Oscar for Best Picture? Even though the nominations won't be announced until later this week? And even though I haven't seen the movie? Slumdog Millionaire.
I could be wrong...but I don't think so.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jan 18, 2009 at 11:13:45 am
When Steve Jobs called Blu-ray a big bag of hurt, he was being asked why the new MacBooks have no Blu-ray drives. His answer spoke to the cost of licensing the hardware. When his lieutenant Phil Schiller chimed in, HE was speaking about Blu-ray content when he said that the iTunes Store and Apple TV was the right way to deliver HD.
Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.
Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.
Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.
And back in 1983, $500 was real money.
I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.
(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)
There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.
Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.
(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)
This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.
More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.
(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)
I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.
The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.
I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.
Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Nov 25, 2008 at 9:20:40 am
I watched a couple of movies over the weekend where Macs were prominently featured, "Independence Day," which holds up better than you might think, and "Office Space," which gets funnier with time, and with every viewing.
(BTW, I watched "Office Space" in HD on my DVR. Not on Blu-ray yet, suckas. More on that in another post, but the general rule of thumb is, no format has arrived until "Office Space" has arrived on it.)
Both of these were pre OS X of course, so the screens had our pal the Chicago font prominently on display.
Neither movie featured the System 8 bomb, but if you remember the days of the Power PC transition from System 6 to 7, and 7 to 8, we all saw it plenty. Mac was wall-to-wall crashes for a couple years BS (Between Steve).
I bring this up because neither movie had the Macs acting much like Macs. They basically used some kind of animation playing on the computer screen, or composited into it, that allowed the designers to make the machine do what they wanted it to -- without being limited by what applications or behaviors were actually available.
You certainly see this with Windows machines too, on shows and movies everywhere you turn. Clearly identifiable machines, doing things clearly not happening in any real application. Or doing ridiculous things like "enhancing" parking lot security tapes to read license plates or something. Sorry bro, if the pixels ain't there, they ain't there.
"House" is one of my favorite shows, and they're sponsored by both Apple and Dell. You see plenty of monitors from both companies, but rarely see applications do anything. And no matter how many Macs you see, there aren't any meaningful Mac apps in the medical world, so if you see software at all, it's going to be on Windows.
But think about something like a James Bond movie with all these crazy overlays and colors. It's like those computer virus movies in the 80s, before most of us had actually seen or used a computer, and before we learned that the worst that most viruses do is load your machine up with porn.
Although you remember the Love Bug? I may not have the name of it exactly right, but it basically sent a message that said "I love you" to everyone in your contact book. My wife was working with a lot of folks in the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, and it was pretty funny. "Hey, I don't love you. Ha ha ha. Wait -- it's not that I don't love working with you...or not that I don't LIKE you...just not that...ha ha ha...just not that way." I sympathize, but I'm still not buying that a virus on a floppy is going to start dropping satellites from the sky.
And for that matter, have you seen the ridiculous things that people supposedly find on the internet? There's a lot of Hollwyood OS going on there too. They're just making up the kind of things that are online, and the ease of finding them. It's just not so.
Anyway, feel free to post any examples here of actual computers running actual applications in actual OSes. I'm not expecting a whole lot of replies.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Oct 28, 2008 at 12:08:22 pm
True confession: I hated The Matrix and its sequels. Absolutely despised them as dreck, a colossal waste of time, talent, and money. I really hate those movies so much that I can't find the words to describe it. Really, really, really hate them. A lot.
I didn't hate Speed Racer, but I didn't love it as much as my friends did either. When it showed up in 1967, it was the first major Japanimation to hit these shores, nothing like the early Warner Brothers cartoons that I loved, and still do. I eventually got into it for what it was, which was pretty cool.
(See below for the opening theme of the original Speed Racer. It's the only clip I can find...which tells me that it'll probably be gone soon. Don't blame me if the link is dead when you try to get there.)
Here's the cool part: the movie version of Speed Racer by the Wachowski brothers is coming this summer, and I'm ridiculously psyched for it. Check out the HD trailer, available in both 720 and 1080. Awesome.
(It continues to utterly mystify me that the MacBook series are the only 15-inch laptops on the market that don't support 1080. My wife had a VAIO that supported full-raster 1920x1080 before the turn of the century.)
The Ain't it Cool blog is the place for all things, well, cool. They have the links to the 2 international trailers that followed the US version below.
BTW, if you're even vaguely a fan of anything sci-fi, fantasy, Lost, Kevin Smith, comics, etc. you really should swing by Ain't it Cool every now and again. The guy who runs it, Harry Knowles, and his pals are true nut cases, but Harry's blog has such enormous influence that he has gained some of the most intimate access to this news on the planet.
Anyway, I'll see you at Speed Racer in May.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 14, 2008 at 4:23:09 am
The move "Once" was one of my favorites from 2007, and against all odds, a song from this lo-budget indie WON the best song award. It led to the most magical moment I've seen in over 35 years of avid Oscar watching. Too bad you're never going to see it. It only aired ONCE, and Oscar is trying to make sure that you never see it again.
"Once" is the story of two musicians who accidentally develop an intimacy that ultimately, very gently, pushes them back to their previous loves. It's sweet and beautiful, and has GREAT music. Hence the Oscar nom and win.
Among the reasons the movie itself felt so fresh is that the two lead actors are actually musicians who've never acted before. Glenn Hansard is a member of The Frames, another member of whom made his directing debut with the movie. Marketa Irglova, a classically trained Czech emigre, plays a...classicly trained Czech emigre. The Oscar-winning song is "Falling Slowly," and was written together by both the actors and the characters. Check it out on YouTube while you're waiting for Netflix to deliver Once to your doorstep. You HAVE to see this DVD.
When they won the Oscar, you've never seen two more surprised or grateful people in your life. And in typical Oscar fashion, they cut to commercial after Glenn's speech, and before hers. Grrrrr.....
Coolest Oscar moment EVER: host Jon Steward comes back from commercial AND BRINGS HER BACK OUT to give HER speech. It was an amazing speech, and the audience went nuts over the whole thing. It was no wonder that the whole thing, both speeches and Jon putting them together was YouTubed all over the place.
No wonder Oscar made them yank it down. This is the same industry that fought home releases believing FIRMLY that it would be the death of the movies. They fought rentals because it would undercut the money they started to make from home sales.
And here we are. While rentals boom, home sales are now BIGGER than box office sales...which are actually bigger than ever, and still trending upward.
SEE??? The more people can see good movies, they more they WANT good movies. Even though plenty of movies bite (like books, music, TV, etc.), people find their way to good ones, and go to theaters hoping for more.
This was the lowest rated Oscar telecast since Nielsen started tracking it in 1973. You think that if people could see a moment of such overwhelming joy and surprise that they might tune in next year hoping for more? The history of movies says ABSOLUTELY ENTIRELY YESSSSS!!!!
And yet, they're determined that it air only ONCE, and you never get to see it. It will have the opposite effect than they hope....which, if the music business is capable of learning anything (still up for debate), is learning right now. Guard the gates, and guess what? PEOPLE DON'T GO THROUGH THE GATE.
While they don't have the video, at least Oscars.com has the speech in print. It doesn't give you ANY of the flavor, but worth checking out despite Oscar not wanting you to to ever get any of that flavor, EVER.
Fer pete's sake, why don't they at least sell DVDs of the thing? Again, following the experience of the movies, they'll make more from the DVD sales than they do from airing the Oscars ONCE. Even the NFL, who puts on the Super Bowl -- a MUCH bigger event than the Oscars -- re-airs the game on the NFL Network, and sells DVDs of it. Why? Because they want to MAKE MONEY, both from the people who didn't see it the first time, and more important, from people who DID see it, and want to see it again.
And Oscar, if you sell a DVD of the show with the award for ONCE, I'll be first in line to buy it, because I want to see the award-winning performance from ONCE, and the amazing speeches from the award-winners, more than ONCE.
The fact is that you can still find this Oscar moment online now and again, by searching "Marketa Irglova Oscar." You can also find pieces of the funniest host gig EVER, by Jon Stewart by searching "Jon Stewart Oscar."
And to end with a legit search, check out thedailyshow.com for some of Jon's stories about the Oscars. One of the best is him telling that Czech girl Madeline Albright, humbly but firmly, There was NO WAY Marketa Irglova was NOT coming back out.
You can also find the actual performance from Once at YouTube. Why? Because Glenn Hansard has been using the net, including YouTube, for YEARS to build an audience. You'll find plenty of other results for other live performances of it.
Too bad that the most uplifting, unpredictable moment in Oscar history only aired ONCE, and you'll never get to see it again. Maybe they'll eventually see that they'll make MORE money by giving people an opportunity to see moments like this more than ONCE.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 1, 2008 at 6:23:47 am
As I write this, it's Oscar eve. Just like Christmas eve, only more exciting. At least to my wife Nora and me. In fact, our primary celebration of Christmas is going to the movies, preferably a movie where things blow up. A festival of bright lights if you will.
It's not really the contest aspect of the thing. Most years we see a significant number of the nominated films. This year, we haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for a major award. A lot of the movies look wonderful, especially Juno, but we just haven't gotten around to it.
One reason is that we keep upgrading our home theater - most recently with an upconverting DVD player. I can honestly say that our viewing experience is every bit as satisfying as a trip to the movie theater...
...with one obvious exception. There's something tribal about sitting in an audience of strangers, being moved by the same story in our own ways. It can be startling to have the same experience, including those rare occassions...though not as rare as you might think...of rising in a spontaneous ovation at the end.
The main reason we no longer experience that is, quite simply, that we don't live within walking distance of a theater anymore -- one of the great pleasures of living in the city, but not enough to outweigh the much greater pleasures of living just a tad further out.
The other reason we don't go to movies as often is Netflix, but that's for another blog post.
We love the Oscars because we like being surprised.
Last year, it was the appearance of Pan's Labyrinth, a movie with a luscious look. The REAL surprise for us was the film that won in the Foreign category was Children of God. It featured an amazing performance by Clive Owen, who has become one of our very, very favorite actors, and by far our favorite performance in Michael Caine's long career.
We're thrilled that ridiculous musical numbers are gone -- reason enough to be glad that Billy Crystal isn't the host. Instead, we love presentations like the short film by Errol Morris that I wrote about here.
We've also been caught off guard by the musical performances by real musicians. For example, the Oscars were where we first heard Elliot Smith.
(This is in contrast to the travesty of 1984, when, instead of Phil Collins, the original performer, the Academy had Ann Reinking perform it instead. The Academy apparently didn't know who Phil is.)
Another rare pleasure is seeing people earn long-desrved rewards. Last year's Martin Scorcese win, as well as Speilberg's win for Schindler's List, were as much awards for earlier films as anything else...and there's nothing wrong with that.
(re: Scorcese, I wrote about that award last year, praising the third Oscar for his editor, Thelma Schoonmacher...while also arguing that Scorcese may not have been as overlooked as one might think.)
I don't really go in for predictions anymore. It's not because I don't go to as many movies. Magazines like Variety and Entertainment Weekly, as well as their excellent websites, are among the sources that give us all we need to track momentum, which is ultimately more important than quality. And seriously, when have either awards or box office had anything to do with quality one way or the other?
That said, there's one race I'm especially interested in. Kevin O'Connell has this year been nominated for his TWENTIETH nomination in the Sound Mixing category. EW has been waging a campaign on his behalf since last year. It would be really cool if he won.
Even though most of this post doesn't have much else to do with this year's awards, I'll still swing by for an update. Otherwise, it's Oscar and me and Nora, joined this year by her sister Roxanne and their mother, all tuning in more for this than we do for Christmas.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Feb 23, 2008 at 8:50:26 pm
It's not even a background, really. It's pretty explicitly the absence of a background. Even lighting, no shadows, almost adrift. Not in a bad way. Stephen Smith did a great job of covering this in the May-June issue of Creative COW Magazine, including why it's best to use chroma keys to acheive the look.
The most frequent place you're seeing it these days is the "I'm a Mac" ads. (Check the end of this entry for a great variation.) If you cast your mind back a little further, you might recall the same look in the Apple "switch" campaign. As an Oscar-maniac, I hope you saw the short film with this look in the 2006 Academy Awards show, one of the highlights of what I thought was the best Oscarcast in years.
All from the same guy. The guy who invented the look: Errol Morris.
Almost. While it was common in still photography, it hadn't been used in any meaningful way before he used it for the first time in a short film for the 2002 Oscars.
You may have heard his name before, by the way. He won an Academy Award for the documentary The Fog of War, and has been nominated for others of his films, which include The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven, and Fast Cheap & Out of Control
Roger Ebert has said, "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more...Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."
Mr. Morris is not shy. This quote is on the front page of his website.
I've always been struck that he's also unapologetic for enjoying making commercials, including the Mac Switch and "I'm a Mac" campaigns. You can find dozens and dozens of his commercials at his website. Be sure to check the links in the right margin -- yet dozens more.
These full-frame commercials are what got him the gig making the short film for the 2002 Oscar Award, where he used the white background style for the first time. The short film that opened the show that year instead of the traditional musical number is a whole bunch of folks, famous and not, talking about movies they love.
First, watch it here. I watch it pretty regularly, and it still delights me every time.
Just in case you're thinking that reading this might be a waste of your time, here's an excerpt from the article.
The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. Walter Cronkite was [on camera.] Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.
You read correctly. Iggy Pop was scheduled to go on after Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out is a big Russell Crowe fan. "And anything with Julia Roberts." You think I'm kidding?
BTW, I also put the "schedule was a shambles" quote in there because every one of us in production can relate to that nightmare.
I interviewed over a hundred people on a white background....Of course, I'm not the first person to film someone on a white background. It's been done by a whole number of photographers, August Sander, Avedon, etc. I have no patent, no trademark, on shooting someone on a white background. Of course, when you try to do something that's free of artifice, somehow that becomes artificial as well.
The white background isn't the reason that that Oscar short, as well as the Switch and I'm a Mac ads, among others that he's done, so compelling. It's the way that people look so directly and comfortably into the camera. To acheive that, he's created a device he affectionately calls The Interrortron. It's like a teleprompter, but instead of text, it superimposes his face in front of the lens.
Soon after the Mac Switch campaign, he applied the same white background style to a series of political ads for MoveOn.org that also played on his own site. They were a variation on the switch campaign if you will: dozens of people who voted for Bush in 2000, but were voting for Kerry in 2004. Darn near none of them was happy about it either, but they felt compelled by their consciences to switch anyway.
When we first discussed shooting [them], my producers and I would have endless discussions about the way to shoot these political ads, what the appropriate way of doing it might be. Should the lighting be absolutely flat? Should the background be white?...But I like the idea that there's something very straightforward about the ads....
So no matter how you feel about either of those candidates, take a look at political advertising at its best. (Sez me.) And again, lots of related links in the right margin.
After watching the spots, you might think you've got his politics pegged, and maybe you do, but it's more complicated than that. He bumped into Karl Rove in a Hilton breakfast room in Waco. I introduced myself. I said, "I'm Errol Morris. I made this film The Fog of War." Karl Rove said, "That's one of my favorite films. I give that as a present to my friends." So it's certainly not that he's incapable of accurately representing what people say across the range of political experience.
That's really the power of The Fog of War, and an example of how startling it is to look someone in the eye, really look. McNamara's clarity is startling, an experience you won't forget.
As deeply visceral a reaction it provokes while watching it, Morris has little confidence that much will happen as a result of his work.
I think we're rudderless bumblers, regardless of what we might imagine. You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.
That's from an interview in a magazine called, appropriately enough, Stop Smiling. Still, there's a reason he keeps going.
My interest is primarily in what people are saying, and in not detracting or distracting from what they're saying, because that's at the center of what I'm doing.
That perspective, applied across all the work he does, and his strong visual style, are a few reasons among many why I agree with our man Roger that Morris is among the most important filmmakers -- and commercial-makers -- of our time.
And you thought this was going to be an article about keying.
PS. Xavier Reivax made a short film called "Same" that matches Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same" with film footage, the largest source of which is The Fog of War.
PPS. On the I'm a Mac ads, your pal and mine Eric Bliss sent me this GREAT picture:
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Sep 13, 2007 at 3:27:46 am
As glad as I was to see Mr. Scorcese finally earn a well-deserved Oscar for directing, I was even gladder to see Thelma Schoonmaker earn her third one for Best Achievement in Editing, for her work on The Departed.
She also won in 1981 for Raging Bull and 2005 for The Aviator. She was nominated for Gangs of New York, Goodfellas, and in 1971, Woodstock. (I remember that Scorcese was an editor on that as well, credited as Marty Scorcese. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I remember that, in addition to Asst. Director, he was listed as Thelma’s assistant. IMDb doesn't mention it. Any of you kids able to confirm or correct me?)
Thelma and Marty have worked together exclusively since that time. They even worked together on Michael Jackson’s Bad video! Of course it’s ridiculous that Marty has had to wait this long for an Oscar.
(BTW, among the five other directors to have multiple nominations and never win are Robert Altman with 5 nominations – his Oscar was an honorary one -- and Alfred Hitchcock with 6.)
I was just as surprised by some of his pictures that weren’t even nominated, like Mean Streets, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Yeah, the TV series was kind of dopey, but Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Oscar for her work in it. It’s the real deal, and still maybe my favorite of his pictures.
Jaw-droppingly astounding was that he wasn’t even nominated for Taxi Driver. ‘Nuff said.
One of the things I’ve wondered is if the nod for The Departed – a mid-ranking Scorcese at best – wasn’t also to make up for slights like Taxi Driver.
Now here’s the heretical part: I can’t say I disagree with any of the choices during years that he lost. I got this from Entertainment Weekly. (Sorry, can’t find this online,)
Lost with Raging Bull to Robert Redford, Ordinary People.
Lost with Last Temptation of Christ to Barry Levinson, Rain Man.
Lost with with Goodfellas to Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves.
Lost with Gangs of New York to Roman Polanski, The Pianist
Lost with The Aviator to Clint Eastwood with Million Dollar Baby.
I would have voted the same way for all of these. Some are even immediately reflexive. I’ll take Rain Man, Dances, and The Pianist in a walk, and while I wouldn't have voted for it, I thought MDB was a better picture than The Aviator. Most people point to Raging Bull/Ordinary People as the biggest misjudgment, but I’m not buying it.
Here’s the other thing: Thelma deserved to win for the movies that Mary lost for. The Aviator should have been better than it was, but the editing kept it moving more than the story did. Even though I give the 1980 nod to Ordinary People, Raging Bull is a directing and acting masterpiece…but even more of a masterpiece for its editing. So I’m truly delighted for Marty. And perhaps because I’m an editor and understand that part of the process better, I’m thrilled for Thelma.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Sep 13, 2007 at 2:07:27 am
