Movie Musing

Watchmen

2009-03-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

That most American of directors, John Huston, once took it upon himself to create a film version of the Bible. It was the heady sixties, when movie studios were dying and had no read whatsoever on the zeitgeist, and thus were willing to fund anything with old-time movie stars. Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, George C. Scott and Huston himself eat and drink the scenery (along with, one suspects, much "spirit"), and the film itself lumbers across the screen, alternately serene and frenetic, finally running out of energy and collapsing after the great flood.

To adapt the Bible, even if it was only first few books, was a monumental undertaking that was bound to please nobody. After all, this is the one book that many of us were raised to have a personal relationship with, and probably the one book most people have read, so this multitude of imaginations works against the film's efforts to establish some individual identity from the start. (I'm deliberately ignoring the religious implications.) Moreover, the book itself is the very definition of "unfilmable". The necessary special effects alone are only just now within the reach of the film industry, never mind the narrative problems.

Given all that, many people still want a film version of the Bible, and there are those would seek to make it. The film industry, after all, is nothing if not pragmatic. If there's audience ready to see a property, the industry will find a way to give it them.

What does all this have to do with Watchmen?

Watchmen, the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, sits on my bookshelf nestled between my copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible. I consider it (and I'm in good company, here), the definitive masterpiece of superhero comic books. Here was one of the first, if not the first, comic book to take the genre seriously and present its mythology to a literate, adult audience. Like all masterpieces, it succeeds on the most basic level (it's a gripping, entertaining mystery adventure) and it has a multitude of other meanings, signs, symbols and complex imagery. Like Citizen Kane, its cinematic equivalent, it's a book that rewards repeat reading and always seems fresh.

It's also completely unfilmable, for the same reasons as the Bible. Its new film adaptation, directed by Zack Snyder, fails for the same reason Huston's film failed. Huston was a great filmmaker (I'm not sure Snyder is), but the material defeated him. So, that Snyder's Watchmen doesn't completely work is understandable, and this shouldn't be blamed entirely on him and his creative team.

Watchmen is nothing if not visually faithful to the original book. It begins, as do many a good mystery, with a murder. The victim is The Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), who was once part of a masked crime-fighting team known as the Minutemen. After they disbanded in the late 1940s, The Comedian worked mainly for the US government, but was courted in the 1960s by one Ozymandias (played here by Matthew Goode) and other heroes, including Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Rorschack (Jackie Earl Haley) to form a new group of masked heroes. In the film, they are named "Watchmen", although this is a serious deviation from the original book, which never uses that word (in its entirety), let alone that name. In the 1970s, so goes the internal alternate history of the book, The Comedian was assigned to Vietnam with the one true superhero, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), where they quickly bring that war to a victorious end. With Nixon re-elected to a third term in the mid-seventies as a result of this victory, America takes a decidedly different course through the 20th century. After The Comedian fires on an unarmed crowd of protesters in the late 1970s, the Keene Act is passed that outlaws masked vigilantes. The Comedian retired, and that's where we find him as the film opens in a very different 1985.

Snyder makes liberal use of period music to evoke the time, and one does get a certain thrill hearing "99 Red Balloons" used in a serious film, and much of the characters' back-story he compresses into taut, effective montages. Still, with the sheer number of characters and relationships to account for (the summary above leaves out major players such as the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman)), we can excuse the montage-o-rama in the films' first 45 minutes, even if it causes the second half to seem to drag to a halt, the audience having been primed to expect an action film.

Certainly the film looks great, with astonishing special effects realizing Gibbons' classic four-colour panels. Particular kudos must go to the team behind Dr. Manhattan, who appears as a translucent naked man (ample "equipment" included), rendered in graceful CG achieved through motion capture on Crudup, who brings an enormous amount of heart to the role, even if he seems to be some sort of tranquilizer...

Of the rest of the actors, all hold their own, but special mention has to go to Morgan for bringing a visceral, animal menace to The Comedian, Haley for making Rorschack's more outrageous acts of violence seem entirely believable and Wilson, whose stage work is often under appreciated, for bringing Nite Owl just the right amount of pathos and humanity.

The main supporting characters, Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) and Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie) that feature so prominently in the book are among the casualties of the transition from page to screen. Mason in particular, such a crucial character in the book in rooting the story in its past and building its mythology, is reduced to a glorified cameo. Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre, is badly miscast, as Gugino would much better than Akerman at bringing the younger Spectre to life. Gugino's age makeup, by the way, is a hideous mask about as convincing as the makeup in Planet of the Apes. While her part is larger, the role is badly underwritten, only hinting at her importance.

As a film, Watchmen is decidedly uneven in its pacing and somewhat hemmed-in by its own rigid adherence to the visual style of the book. Of course, had they gone another way, and re-imagined the look and settings, there would have been a hue and cry, so perhaps we can understand this. Still, the individual scenes lack life and energy. Ozymandias prances about making speeches, but Goode's accent slips and slides around the Atlantic as he proclaims each speech as if he was a wormy corporate executive rather than the chisled muscle-man of the comic. Manhattan's Mars adventure in the context of a big-screen tentpole film seems middlebrow and pretentious, robbing the film of much-needed narrative momentum. The ending, changed from the orignal, is that deadly combination of unconvincing, unbeliveable and inconsistent.

Many of these problems were encountered at the script stage by the great filmmakers who attempted, then abandoned Watchmen over the years, including Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky. Snyder and his team pushed through and should be congratulated for getting the movie made, even if its evident narrative and conceptual problems remain a blemish with which any director and screewriter would have had to contend.

My hope is that the film will lead audiences back to the source material, however rare that might be. Certainly, it would be wrong to see the film without reading the book and claim to have any understanding of its importance. I seriously doubt anyone seeing this film without having experienced the book will come to the conclusion that this is a masterpiece. It seems that Alan Moore was right all along in calling the book completely unfilmable.

In other words, Watchmen was never going to make a great movie. We should be grateful that it has at least produced a good one.

My Oscar Picks 2009

2009-02-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

Let's get the preliminary stuff out of the way, so the naysayers can relax back into their chairs and leave the article to those who are interested. Some truths about the Oscars:

They certainly don't go to the best films made in the year celebrated (this is rarely, if ever, been true of the Oscars)
They're getting increasingly irrelevant to everything, including box office
They're essentially one collective act of wanking on the part of Hollywood
I haven't had a chance to see 90% of what's nominated this year

So, why do we still care? I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I like the tradition of the thing, the sense of participating in a "live" event (this is as close as a non-sports person ever gets), hissing and cattily pointing out flaws in the stars' choice of clothing, the excuse for a party and the perennial thrill of attempting to outguess the Academy. I think those reasons probably hold for most people who watch the Awards.

So, without further ado, here's my list of who I think will win on Sunday night. Note that, since the Oscars have nothing whatsoever to do with which films should win, or which deserve to win, seeing the films beforehand is really not necessary. Just pay attention to the buzz and the winners of previous awards, such as the Guilds' awards, and you can almost invariably do well.

Best Actor - Mickey Rourke, for The Wrestler. (This is a safe category, as he's already won the guild awards and the Golden Globe.)
Best Director - Danny Boyle, for Slumdog Millionaire. (Boyle's cleaning up in the Guild awards, so he may be headed for a sweep.)
Best Picture - Slumdog Millionaire. (Same reason.)
Best Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger, for The Dark Knight. (This is as close to a sure thing as the Oscars will ever give you.)
Documentary Feature - Man on Wire
Best Actress - Kate Winslet for The Reader. (It's a holocaust movie, which the Academy always loves, and they do love young Kate...)
Best Supporting Actress - Marisa Tomei, for The Wrestler. (The movie has momentum, it's driven by the acting, and there are no other clear favourites, although Viola Davis is the critic's favourite.)
Animated Feature - Wall-E. (This should have been nominated for Best Picture, so it's a lock on this category.)
Screenplay, Adapted - Slumdog Millionaire (It won the Writer's Guild Award, and the movie's probably headed for a sweep.)
Screenplay, Original - Milk (Again, it won the Guild awards, and the film is too important not to be recognized somehow.)

If you're watching for the other categories, I can be of less help/entertainment. Most Academy members don't even know what they're voting for in the technical categories, and the major technical Oscars (cinematography, editing, etc.) usually go along with the winner of the Best Director or Best Picture, which in this case is probably Slumdog Millionaire.

See you on Sunday night!
Ian

My Buffy and Angel Crossover Experience (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Inner Nerd)

2008-07-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

By way of brief explanation…

Just after Christmas this year, Shannon and I finally got around to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. Being huge fans of Firefly and great admirers of Joss Whedon’s writing, it was kind of surprising that we hadn’t already been baptized into the ranks of Buffy-verse residents, but there’s one of the great ironies of my life. I missed Buffy when it was on television the first time, behaving like the ignorant classicist I was and turning my nose up at anything manufactured for that deadly combination of America and TV. Needless to say that, six weeks later, when we finally pulled our heads out of over a month of watching literally nothing but Buffy (we marathoned all seven seasons… it was an amazing way to experience the series for the first time), we were confirmed Whedon disciples, and completely immersed in the show’s characters and mythology.

I think it was Salon’s Laura Miller who called Angel “Buffy methadone”. That almost sums it up, and it’s certainly an accurate description of our experience with the spinoff series. Right after finishing Buffy, we dove head first into Angel, plowing through its five seasons with relentless fanboy obsessiveness. When it finally came to a close, the snow was melting, but our love affair with the “Buffy verse” was far from over. After all, there was the fan fiction, the novels and particularly the comic book series to grapple with. (I’ll be the first to vouch for the quality of the Buffy comic (called simply “Buffy Season Eight”), drawing as it does from many of the show’s writers, including Joss Whedon, to create a plausible, consistent and enjoyable extension of the series.)

There was one thing we had not yet done, and that’s watch both Buffy and Angel, together as they were first broadcast. Recall that we never watched either show when it was actually on TV, so this was actually our first time viewing the series’ side by side. We had presumed, since the shows came out of the same creative family and were set in the same mythic universe, that they would enhance each other, and this was true… at first.

A Bit of Review For Those Non-Geeks…

Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the WB in March of 1997. Its first season was a short one (just like Firefly’s), intended as a summer replacement series. Season 2 started that September, and brought the mythic themes of the show into focus for the first time, including centralizing Buffy’s relationship with Angel and her place in the pantheon of demons, monsters and heroes in the Whedon-verse. It’s really season 2, as most viewers of the show know, that first brought us the Buffy we know and love. Season 3 played damage control to season 2, bringing Angel back from the dead and getting the “Scooby Gang” out of high school. At the end of the season, Angel and Buffy finally go their separate ways, with Angel heading to LA from Sunnydale to make his own way in the world. Cut to….

Buffy 4/ Angel 1

Debuting in the fall of 1999, the first season of Angel is as frustrating, inconsistent, tantalizing and beguiling as the first season of Buffy. The show clearly had to find its feet (the addition of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was a big help), but when watched side by side with Buffy season 4, we found that it was a great way to continue the Buffy experience. One reason for this is simply that season 4 of Buffy isn’t exactly the highlight of the series. Frankenstein monsters, evil government agencies, beered-up frat boys… the villains for the season had a decidedly low-rent, pedestrian flavour, especially in comparison to the resonant Buffy/Angel love story of season 2, or the off-kilter demonic glory of season 3’s Mayor Wilkins. But put the season next to Angel and the shows’ flaws and strengths seem to complement each other, making the whole experience into something of a 44-episode “mega season”, with all the classic Buffy characters.

For example, the story arc involving Faith’s sin and redemption, which stretches over both series, is greatly helped by watching them side by side. It’s always a treat when one character straddles both series, and when it comes to straddling, we know we can always count on Faith.

Buffy 5/ Angel 2

Everything takes a jump up for this season. Angel finally finds its centre (or at least its centre for a few years), introducing the unforgettable Lorne, featuring the return of Darla and a three-episode visit to a demon dimension. Great stuff. Buffy, on the other hand, was having its greatest season in season 5. Watching it again only convinced me further that this was the natural ending of the series, with all the poetry and wonderful melancholy at which the series excelled. All the characters participate in bringing the main story arc featuring 14-year-old Dawn, a mystical key, and Buffy's most powerful enemy yet, a God no less, to its tragic, heroic climax. Both seasons are also helped greatly by the presence of Spike, and it’s through Spike that we get the best crossover experience of the series, Buffy Episode 7 (“Fool for Love”, in which Spike recounts to Buffy the other slayers he’s killed) and Angel Episode 7 (“Darla”, in which Angel recalls the years immediately following when his soul was returned). Watched side by side, the two episodes are as enjoyable and expansive as any Buffy movie would be.

Buffy 6/Angel 3

Here’s where the problems began….

The problem with the match up of Buffy season 6 and Angel season 3 isn’t that either is particularly bad, but that by this point the two shows had taken their preferences in vastly different directions. Buffy’s story was, in retrospect, as powerful as anything that had gone before, including the rising of Evil Willow, the adult, intelligent way the writers dealt with Buffy’s resurrection, and the challenges of life after College. Meanwhile, over at Angel, things had taken a serious turn to the dark side of things, with Hotlz the vampire hunter (or “Alan Parsons Project” as I always called him), Darla’s pregnancy and finally Angel’s son adding to the mix. By about 10 episodes into both series, the gloomy story arc and grim urban surroundings of Angel had become simply too much of a jolt, coming as they did after some wonderfully bizarre episode of Buffy, like “Doublemeat Palace”, not to mention the masterpiece of the series, “Once More, With Feeling”.

I’m ashamed to say, knowing where both series would go from here, we gave up on Angel at this point and decided to continue with Buffy alone.

Buffy 7/Angel 4

I have no first person report on this, since we’ve given up on Angel, but with the urgent militaristic intensity of Buffy this season (its last), as well as the powerful, scene-stealing performance by James Marsters as Spike in almost every episode, it’s difficult to imagine cutting the tension by switching over to Angel. This is the season of Angel that was, if it’s possible, darker and more brooding than those that preceded it. Some crossover opportunities do exist (thanks to Faith), but it strikes me that this would be a less than satisfactory matchup under any circumstances.

Angel 5

… makes up for Angel’s gloomy third and fourth seasons. Freed from commitments on Buffy and Firefly, the creative team brought all their weapons to bear on Angel in its fifth season, and the shows are every bit as good as anything the Whedon-verse ever produced. Once again, James Marsters almost steals the show, but all the characters get their chance to shine, and you get innovative episodes like “Why We Fight” and the unforgettable “Smile Time”. Don’t miss it.

DIY

Here’s a good website to get you started on your own marathon:

http://www.simonhampel.com/buffy.html

See you next time you come over all Slay-y.

REVIEW: Control

2007-11-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

The sad, short life of Ian Curtis has long since passed into rock legend. This new film by photographer Anton Corbijn (he took the famous photos on the cover of The Joshua Tree) meets the legend half-way, re-capitulating most of the legendary elements of the Joy Division singer while simultaneously presenting his story with a stark honesty (or at least, the impression of honesty). The film is therefore caught somewhat uncomfortably between cliches, a rock biopic that's trying not to be. In that tension it, deliberately or accidentally, catches the essential quandary of Curtis himself.

Curtis (played with uncanny accuracy, almost amounting to possession, by Sam Riley) is from a middle class Manchester family and in many ways lives up to their values and expectations. He attends a good, private school, gets a job at the unemployment office and wears a tie every day. It is only the isolation of his little bedroom where he, like so many of us, becomes a rock star. His desk is lined with folders with titles like "lyrics" or "poems". He chain smokes and absorbs albums by David Bowie and Lou Reed, posing in front of his mirror in a gesture familiar to every adolescent. He is thoroughly normal in many ways - his experiments with drugs, for example, amount to nothing more naughty than pilfering from medication from a friend's grandmother. He meets an attractive young girl from his hometown, Deborah (Samantha Morton), who he woos away from his best friend with poetry and brooding charm, and they get married while still teenagers.

His interest in becoming a musician is ultimately catalyzed by attending a Sex Pistols concert with some friends, some of whom have a band called "Warsaw". They are looking for a singer. After the show, Curtis offers his services, and Joy Division is born.

Up to this point in the film, we are on very familiar rock biopic ground. We get the scenes of their hesitant first gigs, the grind of traveling by bus, the first recording sessions, the acquisition of a fast-talking manager (Craig Parkinson, who almost steals the show) and ultimately their success. Curtis's problems begin when he discovers (somewhat late in life, the film is to be believed) that he is epileptic, not a particularly convenient disorder for a rock performer under stage lights. Treatment in the 1970s (again, if the film is to be believed) consisted of a horrendous cocktail of medications with side effects such as "mental confusion" and "fatigue", and the combination of this and Joy Division's nocturnal gigs ultimately costs Curtis his day job. The timing, for him, is rather inconvenient in that he and Deborah have no money and a newborn daughter. (It is refreshing to see a film portray the real costs of pursuing rock and roll dreams.)

As Curtis's fame grows, so does his overwhelming sense of depression and misery. When a sexy Belgian journalist named Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara) comes along, his life becomes more complicated again, with infidelity thrown into the mix. If the film is to be believed, Annik was actually a better match for Curtis than his long-suffering housewife, but he is too moral to make the choice a simple one. The combination of guilt, medication, malaise with music and serious depression lead him, as we all know, to suicide at the age of 23.

Corbijn handles all of this with a great deal of style, choosing to shoot the film in stark black and white. One gets the feeling of privileged intimacy (Corbijn knew Curtis and Joy Division in their prime, and produced some famous photographs of the band), and the key relationships (Curtis, his wife and his mistress) have the ring of complex, evolving truth, rather like in a French New Wave film. The film is not interested in Joy Division's music, although it features a great deal of it. We get no clues (other than telegraphed ones, such as the use of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" when Curtis admits his infidelity) about the music's creation or inspiration. The band themselves (who, as many probably know, would go on to become New Order) are caricatures rather than people, with only Bernard Sumner (who would take over as lead vocalist after Curtis's death) showing any sign of authentic human feeling in the moody, powerful sequence set in Curtis's last days. Samantha Morton is wonderful as Deborah, lending the film a much-needed grounding in the imperatives of real life.

Ultimately, Control's power comes from its attitude towards Curtis himself. Far from being slavishly sympathetic, the film has a welcome emotional distance from its subject, showing how different choices could have led him away from his tragic fate. Curtis comes across as someone who was loved, and was capable of love, but had too much emotional clutter on his plate to commit to marriage, fatherhood, employment, stardom and finally life itself. Whether he could have received the help he so obviously needed is an academic point - it may not have helped him, anyway. Curtis wasn't a victim of anything other than his own demons, and the film only hints, perhaps guessing, as we all must, where they came from and why he couldn't conquer them.

REVIEW: The Assassination of Jesse James

2007-11-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

Winning the prize for "longest and most anachronistic title of the year", The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a slow, atmospheric and ultimately quite moving character study, gussied up in the clothes of an epic western.

From the start, the tone of the film is strictly 19th century, complete with voice over narration introducing us to the strange 1880s American vernacular, with that peculiar mix of stiff formality and casual vulgarity. Not since Unforgiven have I gotten the sense from a western that the speech patterns were so authentic. Much about the film has that same ring of documentary honesty. The film goes out of its way to show us the trivial details of 19th century life, from the meals (many scenes take place over the kitchen table) to the grocery shopping to the toilet facilities (a sex scene is even staged in an outhouse, which must be some kind of first).

That veracity is important, since it balances off the matinée idyll feel of the story, reflected in its twisted and singular title. When we are introduced to Jesse James (Brad Pitt), it is through the lens of 19th century American mythos. He is already the nation's most important celebrity, the subject of dime novels and newspaper headlines for at least a decade. In a scenario familiar to anyone with an interest in the western (or crime) genre, James is just about ready to hang up his gun and retire to Kansas City with his family. The past is difficult for men like him to escape, and he goes to great lengths to conceal his identity (in this pre-photography age, this notion is easier to swallow), up to an including not telling his own children his real name. Pitt plays this aspect of the character with curiously detached amusement, as if the act of becoming ordinary was his most clever crime. James is a criminal who enjoys being a celebrity, whereas his older brother Frank (played with mucho gravity by playwright Sam Shepard) scowls disapprovingly at any attempt to conceal their vicious, criminal nature. How close all this is to actual fact is a matter of some dispute, and the scenes are staged in such a romanticized way that at a certain point, our disbelief is suspended.

The film's initial sequence is a masterstroke - a film within the film, reminding me of nothing so much as Michael Mann's Collateral, in which we are introduced to the characters with a complete mini-story, with a beginning, middle and end, with very satisfying results. We see the new James gang (Frank and Jesse, along with numerous unreliable hired hands, their classic gang having long been dispersed by death or incarceration) gathering to hijack a train, supposedly their last "big score" before they drift off into retirement. Frank is skeptical of the abilities of this new group (which includes such great character actors as Paul Schneider, whose character has the improbable name of Dick Liddil). Jesse seems to have fewer doubts, although Pitt's performance renders his true feelings inscrutable. (In fact, Pitt's whole performance is so erratic that I can't decide whether he is brilliant or simply incapable of emotional modulation.) I have no such reservations in praising the performance of Casey Affleck, who plays the Robert Ford of the title. Ford is one of the new recruits, and initially he approaches Frank James, delivering a litany of hero worship in Affleck's pinched, high voice through feral teeth. Frank doesn't buy any of it, but Ford finds that Jesse James is a much more receptive audience. The actual robbery is carried out with the familiar pace of any modern crime film, complete with arbitrary viciousness and tragedy.

The bulk of the film follows through on the momentum generated in the first sequence, though, at 160 minutes, it never quite manages to build up a head of steam. The plot essentially consists of Jesse's quest to secure his own retirement, including killing or otherwise silencing the ragtag gang members recruited for initial robbery. Ford becomes part of his orbit, initially taken under the outlaw's wing and subsequently rejected, provoking his enlistment with the law (including the dead-on authentic Michael Parks and Ted Levine) to, along with his less morally tortured brother Charley (the always-good Sam Rockwell), betray his former hero in exchange for money and fame. This moral probing forms the film's emotional spine, and Affleck's performance is a triumph. Pitt's problematic performance is in essence a character part - Affleck has the lead, and he is perfectly cast. We grow to know and sympathize with Ford, whose own tragic ending is a sad echo of his hero's.

Films like this usually get labeled "deliberately paced", as a euphemism for "deadeningly slow". Fair warning - the film has its own agenda, and will not be rushed. Perhaps the epilogue-like ending goes on a bit too long, unless one considers that this film is really about Ford, not James. The one major flaw with the film is that it seems to be about something... but what? Celebrity? Crime? Vengeance? Honour? Betrayal? Perhaps all, and perhaps none.

The film was directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik (only his second film), from his own script, but the production company behind it was Ridley Scotts Scott Free, and I sense Sir Ridley's fingers all over the production, including the gorgeous cinematography, meticulous attention to design and detail, the characters' moral complexity and the film's epic-like scope. Perhaps the themes would be less cloudy if Scott himself had helmed the picture. We will never know.

In the end, The Assassination of Jesse James floats free of our imagination, an intriguing and absorbing but ultimately frustrating film.

Confessions of a Small-Town Cineaste

2007-10-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's the Catholic boy in me, but I think it's time for a confession.

I never meant to end up in a small town. Like every other maritimer who's left home, I came here for a job. I presumed that some sacrifices would be required of me to live in a small town, but for the most part, I couldn't think of one that I wasn't prepared to make. Until now.

Of course, for a cineaste, the term "small town" covers a lot of ground. I used to think of London, Ontario (a city of around 300,000) as a small town, because they weren't showing Punch Drunk Love in any local theatres, and I had to drive 2 hours to Toronto to see Seven Samurai. Little did I know...

Nelson is a cool small town - no question about that. Its arts and culture scene is more vibrant (or at least equal to) that of many larger centers. There are some great, creative, energetic people here who have a real commitment to the arts. Despite all that, there's no good cinema, no repertory cinema, no serious film society and basically no opportunity for seeing good films out of the comfort of your home. Having a good video store with a large back catalog helps, as does having a nice home theatre, but it's not a substitute for the true cinematic experience.

I miss the sense that a film was an event. I miss having a local art theatre profile a director (like the Vancity Festival Cinema does in Vancouver), showing several of their films in a given week, allowing a real appreciation for auteurism. I miss midnight screenings of cult favourites (like Wormwood's used to back in Halifax). I miss real film festivals, with older films mixed with the new, put in context by filmmakers and film scholars, rather than political documentaries and token Canadian films tossed out once a month.

When I first came here, I thought I would miss malls, big box stores and the like - not so. I thought I would miss the anonymity of a city, and I do occasionally. But what I really miss is the opportunity to be a true cineaste, to lose myself in the dark with a great piece of cinema.

I guess my most telling confession is that after five years, I've finally found something I miss about Vancouver.

Movies from the Space Age

2007-10-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the space age, with the launch of Sputnik 1 on this day in 1957. Since NASA is adrift (at least in terms of manned space exploration) and Russia is still recovering from financial collapse by selling Soyuz seats to tourists, it's time to think about how the space age has been depicted on film for the past 50 years, the only place that still retains some vision. So, here are a few notable landmarks in that peculiar genre of cinema that attempts to portray a reasonably realistic vision of the exploration of space.

1. Destination Moon (1950). I know, it's before the space age started for "real", but it's a great example of what we thought space travel would be like before it was ever done. By 1950, the theory was in place (things like weightlessness, etc.) and the mythic astronaut archetypes were already entrenched. It's interesting to see how much they got "right", and how much they didn't.

2. Forbidden Planet (1956). The first attempt to translate the headiness of "hard" science fiction into film is still an entertaining, if overly plotted and "talky" movie. The special effects haven't dated nearly as much as they deserve to, and it's pretty clear that this was the template from which Star Trek was struck. Realistic? Not really. But it was movies like this that the people who went to the moon were watching.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Arthur C. Clarke often said that he and Stanley Kubrick were setting out to make the "proverbial good science fiction movie", since neither had seen a film that matched the intelligence and verisimilitude of the sci fi they had read. 2001 succeeds on a number of levels (it's probably one of the most-analyzed films in history), but it's notable today for at least making the attempt to get the physics of space travel correct. So, astronauts don't walk around unless they're in a centrifuge (or wearing velcro-shoes, which somehow never caught on), and their spacewalks are slow, careful and tedious, just like in real life. One thing it didn't get right was the topography of the moon. The prevailing image was one of tall, craggy peaks, and in reality the moon's landscape is much more smooth. It's the kind of thing that we didn't find out until we went there, and remember, when this film was produced, we hadn't even orbited it yet.

4. Silent Running (1972). Doug Trumbull had worked on the special effects for 2001, so it was natural that his first film as a director became an effects extravaganza. The film is ultimately much more "dated" than 2001, since it grapples with the topical issue of deforestation and unwisely incorporates a contemporary musical score with songs by Joan Baez. The science, however, has been done worse. As in 2001, the spacecraft don't zip through space like Buck Rogers, but instead move in predetermined orbits and take a long time to communicate with earth. The notion of giant, domed gardens in space is something that may yet come to pass in reality, and it certainly created the kind of geodesic template for the kinds of ships seen in Battlestar Galactica and the abortive 80s series Earth Star Voyager.

5. The Andromeda Strain (1971). Trumbull also helmed the cutting-edge effects for this Robert Wise sci-fi film, an adaptation of Michael Crichton's scientifically rigorous novel about a virulent organism brought to earth on a returning space probe. The premise of the film was realistic enough for NASA to require returning lunar astronauts (at least on the first few landings) to undergo two weeks of quarantine upon their return to earth. As a film, it plays like the scientific procedural the novel succeeds in being, which doesn't always make for compelling cinema, but having Crichton on board certainly guaranteed that the science was plausible. Today it's most memorable as a fascinating example of late-60s space-age thinking.

6. Alien (1979). For all its success, Ridley Scott's first sci-fi film is simply a skillfully made, high-budget monster movie, but its space-age styling (courtesy of technology-nut designer Ron Cobb) is more realistic than it needed to be. For example, the Sulacco's cathedral-esque spires illustrate the obvious point that a spacecraft has no need to be sleek in a vacuum (for an obvious influence, look at the Alliance cruisers in Joss Wheedon's Firefly), and landing on a planet is not as easy as simply pointing the ship "down" and hitting the gas. The way the alien is ultimately disposed of, making use of pressure differential and vacuum, is remarkably realistic (artificial gravity notwithstanding) and indicative of, by then, decades of experience in human spaceflight.

7. 2010 (1984). Its politics have not aged as well as its effects (to be fair - no one could have predicted that the cold war would be over in 5 years), but 2010 carries on the tradition of its predecessor in the use of centrifuges for gravity (still the only plausible way of creating it in space), realistic flight times (using hibernation) and slow, careful spacewalks. The scenery of Jupiter and its moons is also taken straight from the images returned by Voyagers 1 and 2, making it the most accurate portrayal of a solar planetary system not yet visited by humans on record.

8. Apollo 13 (1995). Probably the most accurate space flight film ever made, Ron Howard took the unprecedented step of shooting zero-g scenes in zero-g. There are serious proposals on the table today to set up a movie studio in orbit which, if it comes to pass, might make it possible to shoot the rest of the Apollo program with similar accuracy. The film also makes extensive use of CG (then a new technology) and copies the space-to-ground radio transmissions verbatim. What other film has an action scene that hinges on someone's ability to do long division?

9. Mission to Mars (2000). Those of us with some vague memory of high school biology will be taken completely out of the film by the atrocious molecular biology the film's climax hinges upon, but the filmmakers seem to have spent their consultant budget on the physics, as the orbital ballet that happens early in the film is as accurate as anything set to film. Mars entered our consciousness in the early 2000s as the next logical step for space exploration, but we probably won't be going there for a while, due to political shortsightedness, but this film and Red Planet are true products of our culture's burgeoning interest in it.

10. Space Cowboys (2000). Again produced with the cooperation of NASA, Clint Eastwood's science fiction attempt is more or less plausible (although in reality, only one senior citizen is likely to be allowed to fly to space at a time). The uncomfortable relationship between the US and Russian space programs is at the core of the film's narrative conflict, something that fairly accurately reflects the current state of manned space exploration. Space Cowboys also brings things full circle in a way, by re-visiting the roots of the space program, and illustrating how much things have changed.

Of course, you should all see the Right Stuff, but oddly, that movie is more about the culture of American heroism than it really is about technology. There are loads of screamingly bad technical gaffes in it, but that doesn't stop it from being an interesting bit of film.

So, after 50 years, space travel has become both more and less exciting for us. Let's hope in another 50 years we'll have made some real progress in the exploration of our world, instead of, as we are now, hunkering down in a cave and bitching about who gets the most meat.

REVIEW: In Memory of Myself

2007-10-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

This new film from rising Italian director Saverio Costanzo is an affecting and original piece of art that may seem odd to a mainstream film audience. Since Kubrick's 2001, filmmakers have been experimenting with original approaches to narrative, though most films still tend to tell stories in familiar ways. In Memory of Myself achieves a victory for the form in that it does that most difficult of cinematic tasks: portraying an internal spiritual and psychological struggle without resorting to plot contrivances, overt narrative conflict or that most deadly explicit of measures, internal monologue. Most filmmakers who try this kind of thing fail. Costanzo doesn't, and it is the most important achievement of this powerful film.

The film concerns Andrea (Christo Jivkov), an novice in the Jesuit Order, which essentially means he is a person traveling between two worlds. Jesuits are notoriously hard on their new initiates, and with good reason. The decision to join a priesthood as demanding as the Jesuits is not one to be taken lightly. As his Father Superior (André Hennicke) tells Andrea more often than not, "You judge the order, but the order also judges you." His first challenge is to spend two weeks in a silent world of routine and contemplation, after which, again in the words of the Father Superior, "You will know if you have a vocation or not". This long period of discernment forms the bulk of the story.

And what a fascinating story it is. Right from the start, we know this is a different kind of film, with little dialogue, action or conflict. Its pace is hypnotic, a word used all-t00-often by critics as a synonym of "boring", but in this case it is entirely appropriate. We are introduced to the routine of waking, work, study, eating and prayer, all of which are taken equally seriously by the initiates. We begin, through Andrea, to know some of the other novices, notably Fausto (Fausto Russo Alesi), who is undergoing his own personal struggle that culminates in a haunting scene of him banging his head repeatedly against the bathroom wall. His fumbling words in class, in which he has to explain a line of scripture, suggest some great spiritual war within him, but the film isn't interested in the specifics, on in the way Andrea sees their external manifestation. Later, we meet the deeply emotional Zanna (Filippo Timi), who struggles to reconcile the cold, distant Jesuit rituals with the Biblical Jesus, a figure that said little about mopping floors, but much about love. Zanna seems to spend more and more time in the infirmary, where it becomes clear that a member of the order is dying.

As time passes, we see Andrea broken down piece by piece. He is lost between the "real world", which he poignantly watches through the windows at the monastery each night, and the spirit world, which seems to him just out of reach. He is cold, observant (his fellow novices think him judgmental), but we know that in order to fully make the transition, he must face aspects of himself he does not wish to face. He must become human in order to become divine. The last act of the film is a masterfully controlled series of affecting images, telling us everything we need to know about Andrea's struggle with no need for dialogue.

Costanzo's control over the film is in fact the most notable element of it. The deliberate, graceful tracking shots and frequent use of subjective camera draw us into this strange world of spirit and mystery. Classical music is used to enhance this strange, medieval life pattern, contrasted sharply with the images of these practitioners of profoundly ancient rituals making use of laptop computers and CD players. Costanzo also steers the plot away from the cliched territory of homosexual desire, something with which the Catholic church has become, somewhat unfairly, associated. He isn't interested in scoring easy PC points, but instead exploring a deep spiritual mystery.

Few films would dare to be this bold.

Eastern Promises

2007-10-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

I had a chance, this weekend, to visit Vancouver and catch some new films. (This is an inevitable consequence of living in a small rural community - you usually have to wait for DVD to see new releases other than big Hollywood crap.) One of these was David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises, which, if my opinion means anything to anyone, is an absolutely unmissable effort by the greatest working Canadian director.

A woman walks into a London drugstore late at night, pregnant, pleading for help in broken English. Below her is a pool of blood. She is taken to a hospital, where she is assigned a midwife named Anna (played by Naomi Watts), who, along with doctors, manages to save her baby, but not her. Anna makes it her mission to discover this woman's story, a process that leads her to a Russian restaurant owned and operated by Mr. Semyon (played masterfully by Armin Mueller-Stahl). Semyon knew Anna's father (she is a second-generation Russian immigrant), and treats her warmly, offering to translate from Russian the diary of the dead woman. But all is not right at his restaurant. Shady characters, including his uncouth, violent son Kirill (French superstar Vincent Cassel) seem to populate the street outside. Most mysterious of all is Kirill's "driver", a cold, spare, sinister Russian named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, in the performance of his career).

To reveal more of the plot is to rob you of the genuine pleasures of allowing its various twists and turns to unfold, but it's not hard to see that the Russian mafia plays a role in the film, and Anna is drawn into a dangerous world, with dangerous people. And that Nikolai... there's something about him...

Cronenberg's films are all about identity and transformation, and Eastern Promises is no exception. No one in this film is who they seem at first blush, except perhaps Anna's mother and uncle, who sensibly warn her to stop this relentless search for the dead girl's identity. Some of their hesitation comes from what her Russian uncle reads in the diary. It's not pleasant.

The other Cronenberg signature is his penchant for violence and gore, although in this film and its companion piece, A History of Violence, the gore is used to good, not excessive effect. You make think that hyperbole after seeing the film, but pause for a moment to consider Cronenberg's motivation. Violence is disturbing. It should be upsetting. I would rather see the real consequences of something like a knife fight (featured in a scene guaranteed to become a classic, set in a Turkish bath) then see some action hero jump from jet fighter to moving car, taking plate glass to the face without so much as a bruise. Cronenberg shows it, all of it, to his credit. Violence shouldn't be exciting. It's not pleasant.

For all that unpleasantness, the film achieves a transcendental quality by ultimately pushing all of its plot-related intricacies and gory violence aside and finally settling on a profoundly human exploration of the nature of identity and morality. Far more haunting an effective than A History of Violence (a great movie in itself), Eastern Promises goes deep, and the final scene (and words) linger in the imagination. It may well be Cronenberg's masterpiece.

Venus, Black Snakes and Dirty OId Men

2007-09-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

Two films I had the chance to see recently, back-to-back, were Venus (dir. Roger Michell) and Black Snake Moan (dir. Craig Brewer), two low-budget indie films from last year. I honestly hadn't intended to consider the two films together - they were simply two that were on my "to see" list and I happened to pick both of them up on the same night. What I didn't realize is that they shared so much, but differed in important ways.

Both films have the same general narrative gimmick - an older man (in the case of Venus, a cadaverous Peter O'Toole, in Black Snake Moan, Samuel L. Jackson) crosses paths at a crucial point in his life with a young, attractive, libidinous woman. Temptation ensues, eventually both characters learn "life lessons" in the tedious Bob McKee tradition and emerge healed. Of the two, I'd have to give Black Snake Moan the edge, simply because its setting (the deep south) and its metaphorical carpet (southern gothic blues) is less well-trodden ground than in the case of Venus's aging, Shakespeare-quoting, whiskey-drinking British. Both films, though, have an essential sweetness, an old-fashioned sense of romance and humanity that is enormously appealing.

What superficially drives the drama in both cases is the immortal question, "Will they or won't they?" Venus simply tosses the issue away early on, with O'Toole having prostate surgery that renders the question academic. Black Snake Moan toys with it a bit more seriously, but ultimately both films are playing past the titillation, and are more interested in treating the characters as lost souls in need of each other's rescue.

There's a darkness to both films, but ironically it's Venus that tells the darker story in the "lighter" surroundings of autumnal London, and Black Snake Moan that takes the more heartwarming route in the deep, myth-laden vernacular of the South. Venus is about O'Toole's character coming to know himself through the girl, having one last hurrah, but is finally about death. Black Snake Moan touches on death but veers away from it towards life. Where death hangs over Venus, it simply passes through Black Snake Moan. John Cothran's character in Black Snake, Rev. RL., articulates this explicitly in a moving, gentle speech about how religion has it all wrong in focusing on heaven, when really it should focus on what's happening day to day. In Venus, the characters learn how to die with dignity (a process which, ironically, involves a great deal of indignity), whereas in Black Snake, the characters learn how to live with it.

An interesting PS to my thoughts on these films comes from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops which, you may be surprised to hear, offers some perceptive and intelligent film analysis on their website, but in the case of these films, their objections are telling. Their take on Venus is that it is "morally offensive", whereas Black Snake Moan they simply rate as "limited", that is, appealing to a limited audience who may be turned off by the moral offenses in it. Their objection seems to essentially come down to, unsurprisingly, sex. The O'Toole character is offensive because he wants sex, but can't physically have it, where as Jackson's character is not as offensive, because he is capable of it, but chooses not to. The Bishops, whose opinion I generally respect, seem to have missed the point of both films, in that they are, neither of them, really about sex. Of course, the notion of "dying with dignity" doesn't seem to hold much water with Catholic dogma, either, so perhaps this is a part of their issue with Venus. Interesting, though, that desire is at the heart of it. I think it would make an interesting moral discussion, but in the meantime, feel free to enjoy both films.

The Problem with Downloading

2007-09-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

Since we've established that the HD format war is probably going to wind up killing both disc formats for home video (see previous entry), the common belief is that eventually all disc formats will be replaced by downloading from some kind of legitimate video distributor, sort of like how Apple's iTunes Store works for music. It's certainly a tempting thought to make the leap from audio to video, particularly since many people seem to have climbed onto the legitimate downloading bandwagon. But there are major logical flaws to the argument "downloading will succeed DVD rental", and they all revolve around this notion of what the internet "should" be, and what the video market "should" be, and what it really is. Once you let go of those romantic notions, reality becomes astonishingly simple.

In a nutshell, downloading's not going to work until two conditions are met:

Adequate bandwidth
Familiar delivery models

Let's take the second point first. Last time, we discussed what killed laserdisc (no rental penetration, big discs, high price) and why DVD succeeded where it failed (familiar size, easily rentable, reasonable price). The key here is familiarity. Typical consumers don't want to learn a whole new paradigm every time the technology is incrementally improved. It just doesn't work that way - who wants to work to give companies their money? The only reason Apple has succeed where everyone else (including Rhapsody) has failed is that they made it really, really easy for the consumer. Their store is built right into their media player, which is cross-platform and easy to install and use.

But let's be honest - the Apple store (and iTunes) is very much a generational phenomenon. Young people (and I guess I'm still one of those...) find it a sensible and convenient way to purchase music legally. But I seriously doubt that older folks, including the world's largest single demographic (baby boomers) have bought into it with as much eagerness. For them, buying music means going to a store, picking out a CD/LP/Tape, talking to the clerk, maybe listening to a track and having their purchase rung up on a register. Yes, they're on the way out, but they're still the bulk of consumers.

Go into a video store on a Friday night and take a look at who's there. Is everyone 25 or under? Or are there parents with kids, couples picking out a movie to watch together on the couch and people just getting off work for the weekend? We understand what a video store is. We've lived with it for 15 years. Even my people my grandparents' age understand the business model. I simply can't see why the majority (and yes, majority does rule in the case of marketing) of consumers would abandon a model they know well for a model they hardly know at all just because some tech guru told them it was "better". Downloading eliminates the "store experience", the notion of browsing through shelves, chatting with friends you meet at the store, having something recommended to you by a human being. It seems highly unlikely that this model will change anytime soon.

Besides, downloading is never going to catch on in a big way until bandwidth is increased by an order of magnitude. Perhaps you've heard the old story of how the reservoir in most American cities is drained to dangerously low levels once each year during halftime at the Super Bowl, where tens of millions of people all flush their toilets at the same time. Now imagine a typical Friday night in New York or LA, where perhaps a million people would try to download the same movie at roughly the same time. If this were tried today, the internet would either crash altogether, or the download speeds would be such that a typical 7 GB DVD would be just about ready to play by the time you go back to work on the following Monday morning. (And this is not even considering the next-generation HD formats for which this hoopla is supposed to be the answer.)

Yes, I can hear the objections already: "But lots of people download using Bittorrent or Limewire!" (Peer-to-peer networks that are often unreliable and depend on sharing of files between users to artificially increase apparent bandwidth - I think we know what major record labels and movie studios think of those.) "How is this different from pay-per-view on satellite?" (Two ways: a very small install base and privately owned bandwidth delivery for which users pay a large premium.) "Apple's iTunes store seems to work fine!" (Audio requires about 1/10th the bandwidth of video - and besides, not everyone wants the same song at the same time.)

What this adds up to is a need for greatly increased bandwidth if the disc format and all it entails (video stores, etc.) is ever to be replaced. Who's going to pay for that bandwidth? The government? (Last time I checked, the right to download movies wasn't in the constitution.) Private industry? (Fine, if you want to pay $1000/movie, or some similarly outrageous price that would have to be charged to recoup the staggering upfront cost of re-wiring the world.)

The fact is that, until downloading as fast and cheap as jumping in the car and heading to the video store, it's not going to catch on. Period. As much as some would like it, as much as it seems like the elegant, 2007 solution, it's just not realistic. You can't always get what you want.

The take home message is a familiar one: DVD is here to stay.

The Buzz About HD Home Video

2007-09-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

If your memories can possibly reach back through the mists of time to an era before DVD, you may be able to recall some dim notion of a home video format called "video tape". Sure, it wasn't digital (back then we didn't really even know what that meant), but it was cheap and common and we were all happy with it for around 15 years. Those who weren't happy with it invested in the horrendously expensive and marginally better "laserdisc", which was doomed essentially from the start by being a big, unwieldy, non-recordable, non-rentable video medium. Some of us still retain these dinosaurs in our collections, myself included, for various sentimental reasons. (Remember, it was the laserdisc that introduced us to the concept of "making of" documentaries on the disc, "audio commentary" tracks and, towards the end, soundtracks presented in digital surround sound.)

At a certain point (between 1997 and 2000), the industry did a big flip and embraced DVD as the standard bearer for home video technology. After flirting with a few other formats (VCD, SVCD, DivX), it was decided that DVD, with its MPEG-2 compression and built-in digital soundtracks, as well as CD-size, was the way to go. All major studios jumped on board, both discs and players came down in price and everyone suddenly thought video tape and laserdisc were fuzzy, blurry relics.

On what did we base this decision? Yes, DVD looked and sounded better, but was the public at large really that unhappy with the choices they had? I doubt it. It had a lot more to do with some simple market factors, such as penetration of the rental market (laserdisc never quite managed to do this), small, familiar size and price. I can imagine that the typical consumer (full disclosure: I don't think I was ever one of those) just thought that if they could get something better, as easily, for the same price, then why not make the jump?

These days, I have yet to encounter anyone other than a high-tech blogger who is truly displeased with the video quality of DVD. Even 73% high-end home-theatre owners, according to a recent poll, are satisfied with DVD as a video delivery medium. So, what's the fuss about HDTV? Clearly most people don't consider the DVD broken. What's the rush to fix it?

Even if there was dissatisfaction with the current format, the industry tearing itself apart over which "high definition" format to adopt, Blu-ray disc or HD-DVD, is only driving consumers further back into their DVD collections. I suspect, based on nothing but some info and some common sense, that neither format will come out on top unless the same factors that drove the eager adoption of DVD occur:

The new formats become adopted by the rental market.
The players become inexpensive.
HDTV's, which are necessary to see any benefit of either new format, become more numerous than "old fashioned" TV's.
The industry agrees on a format and promotes it as the logical successor to a format you already know and love. That is, they put an end to this silly "format war".

Those who are clamoring for the DVD to be retired had better ask themselves if any of those four conditions has happened, or will happen soon, because until they do, the DVD is here to stay.

Does Size Matter?

2007-02-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Of course it doesn't... except when we're talking about a TV screen. How ridiculous is it, anyway, that we constantly crave a bigger screen. And here's a hint: it's never big enough.

A few years ago, I was sharing a house with an old friend and we decided that between the two of us we could build a pretty great ad-hoc home theatre in the darkened, unfinished basement if we invested in an inexpensive DLP projector and a white bedsheet. He already had a high-end receiver and speakers, and we figured that either of our DVD players would be up to the task. A couple of months, some cash and a serious amount of dusting later, we had our theatre. The screen was massive (we measured it out at about 150 inches diagonal, 16x9) and the picture quality was pretty good, considering.

Here was the problem: after about three months, our eyes adjusted and we simply got used to it. I'm not saying it ever seemed small, but our use of the theatre did extend into overkill territory, particularly when we started watching the Simpsons down there first thing in the morning with our coffee.

I moved on some time after that, and he met a girl with kids and got married, moving into a bigger house. He kept the theatre setup (his new wife's two-year-old dubbed it the "Big Room"), but it was seeing less and less use. It was bothersome to swtich everything on, cut the lights, get situated on the couch, etc. Much more comfortable to just toss a movie on the 27 inch 4x3 TV in the bedroom. It wasn't long after that that the projector's colour wheel died, and he decided not to get it replaced.

I, in the meantime, invested in a 16x9 TV that was smallish (30 inches) but quite heavy and bulky enough, thank you very much. I sometimes catch myself looking at the screen now and thinking how small it is, especially when watching a film in 2:35:1 aspect ratio, but I try to keep those impulses to a minimum. After all, the TV was expensive enough that I'm not going to be replacing it anytime soon, and do I really want to ruin my movie-watching eyes by adjusting to a huge screen when simply a medium-size one will do? It's not the size, after all, that matters. At least, that's what I have to keep telling myself.

HD? Half Done?

2007-01-31T17:25:00.000-08:00

A lot has been written in the last year (2006) about the rise of high definition. I've been hearing and reading about high def for over 10 years now, and now that industry "insiders" (whoever they are) are saying that 2007 is the year HD-DVD takes over, it's time to address the facts of this new format, and dispel some of the myths.

1) Most of the TV install base on Earth (the planet that includes more than net-crazy gearheads) does not have the capacity for HD. Even my TV, which is 16x9 and less than three years old, lacks an HDMI input, even though it can display 1080i if fed to it through component video.

2) The number of people using DVD (which the industry insiders now scoff at as being "old technology") is still growing. Many known to me personally have not even made the switch from VHS. And somehow they seem to be advanced beyond the "banging rocks together" stage.

3) The Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, which probably represent the second easiest way for a home user to "get into" HD are not compatible with any TV lacking an HDMI input. Meaning that any TV bought for less than $1000 and more than a year ago is not going to get the job done. That represents a pretty large barrier for the first-time adopter, even when the number of films available on either format gets large.

4) The easiest way of getting into HD, Digital Cable or Satellite TV, is still adopted only by a few consumers, and is more of curiosity than anything else. This has some capacity for growth, but its success has been rooted in its backwards compatibility. HD signals can be received through component video, allowing users like me and others with higher-end TV's to get the benefits of HD video, and the service is piggy-backed on the reliable, old-fashioned TV service that everyone has come to expect.

5) (And most obvious) Most people are perfectly happy with DVD. It provides excellent resolution, sound quality and special features for all but the most finicky consumer.

Conclusion: DVD isn't going anywhere for a long time. There's no need whatsoever to jump on the bandwagon of HD unless you're a discerning technophile with a large amount of disposable income. For everyone else, TV will continue to mean what it did 20 years ago (a box with programs on it) and DVD will continue to be the rental/purchase medium of choice.

That's not to say that films and TV programs will not continue to be shot in HD, as they should. Most news broadcasts are shot in Beta-SR, but I have yet to see a player in someone's home that can play one of those tapes. We'll still be able to enjoy the benefits of the resolution of an HD picture without buying into an expensive new technology.

And finally, there are far more important things in the digital video/home video/DVD world to be concerned about, such as the number of DVD's that are still sold with the label "full screen", meaning cropped and chopped for 4:3. That's a much more vicious mutilation of a film or program than not broadcasting it or watching it in HD, and something about which we as discerning home video enthusiasts should be concerned.

Why is it Called Film?

2006-07-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

Our language seems to be full of anachronisms. I love the fact that on-line digital editors still refer to what they're doing as "cutting" and the finished product as "film". The whole notion of using the verb "filming" is equally amusing. This is hardly a novel observation, but there are few better illustrations of how language changes a lot faster than technology.

One of the things I'm excited about these days is the opportunity to actually shoot and edit real film. I recently acquired a Super 8 movie camera, projector and screen at a used charity store, and I'm in the process of hunting down film and developing facilities. It may be cost prohibitive, but it certainly would be a different experience to physically cut and paste pieces of film together. I'm sure it would give me an interesting insight into how the process of "filmmaking" (there's another anachronism) has evolved from the early 20th century 'till now.

I realize of course that the pros still shoot on 35mm film, but how long is that going to last? Even Superman Returns, I gather, was shot on 24p digital video. It's only a matter of time before "filmmaking" really passes into history.

All Movies Are Modern

2006-07-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Akira Kurosawa always claimed that he didn't make "period" films. No matter what the characters were wearing or what historical period they seemed to be inhabiting, Kurosawa always saw his films as modern-day films, dealing, perhaps somehwat metaphorically, with modern-day issues. This is obviously not a new idea, but it is interested to view historical films as metaphors for their period of production. Film scholarship is all about context (this is also true of Art History and many other scholarly pursuits of the arts). You can't view "Ben Hur" and "Gladiator" as period films in quite the same way, even though the period of history they ostensibly cover is comparable. Their production context was completely different, politically, economically and historically. "Ben Hur" would never be made today, or if it were, it would be substantially different.

People often comment that modern movies are "more realistic" than historical films of the past. The production systems certainly have made it easier to suspend disbelief, but let's think about what we mean by "realistic" for a moment. Any Western that portrays the white settlers as the "good guys" would be considered "not realistic" by today's audience, but entirely believable by an audience in the mid-1940s. It's all about the politics of today, not of the 1880s. Besides that, the attention to historical detail would be different today (even though the "wild west" is myth, not history, but that's another discussion...), allowing a modern audience to more readily plug into what's being presented as being "realistic". As an audience, our physical burden of proof has increased enormously from the 1950s to today, thanks to modern special effects. So, realism in film really consists of two things: how well the behavior of the characters reflects the social norms (and politics) of the production time (not the historical time) and how much attention is paid to the physical re-creation of the world the characters inhabit.

So, the next time you're watching a period film (or, for that matter, a science fiction film), think about when it was made, not when it's set. That's really its historical period.

Bad Movies Make Money

2006-07-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I read a "best of" and "worst of" list. We've all seen these atrocities of serious film scholarship. They appear around the turn of the year and seem to be designed to serve the ostensible purpose of film criticism, namely helping people decide what DVD's to rent. The problem with theses lists is that the format allows so little room to breathe in the writing that the critic has no time to undertake a serious analysis of the film's strengths and weaknesses. Too often bad movie reviews boil down to "not bad, three stars". The lists encourage that kind of writing.

With that disclaimer, they can be illuminating when you stand back and look at the lists in terms of cultural contexts. Inevitably, one comes to the conclusion that you've heard of (and probably seen) most of the films on the "worst" list, and you're hearing about at least half of the "best" list for the first time. Nothing new there. We've all noticed by now how movie exhibitors show the films that will fill the house for the opening weekend, as often as not simply the film that has spent the most money on marketing. Quality is rarely a factor in determining success - it has always been this way.

So why is that nearly all the movies on a "worst of" list have made money (sometimes stupendous amounts) and most of those on a "best of" list never even played in theatres? The system seems designed to perpetuate the bad and actively discourage the good. DVD and home video have made a slight difference (and channels such as IFC help, too), but for the most part we have to accept that we'll always have bad movies, because bad movies make money. Roger Corman figured this out 40 years ago, and Hollywood followed suit shortly after that.

The reason given by the industry for this vicious and destructive cycle is circular logic itself: If the people going to see films are largely males aged 14-18, we're going to make films that appeal to males aged 14-18. Aside from the indie boom of the mid-90s (and look how fast the industry grabbed hold of that and made "indie" into a brand-name), bad movies have consistently done better than their more important counterparts.

The system is broken, and it doesn't look like it will ever be fixed. As appreciators of good cinema, we have to simply accept the fact that the best films won't be at the cinema, the best films will always struggle to be born and the worst films will always make money. The public has been trained to have no taste and then rewarded for it. They're consumers, habituated to plopping down their money to the movie having the biggest poster. In the immortal words of a good (therefore, unsuccessful) film, "Buy... buy more.... buy more and be happy"

Disney Slashes Jobs

2006-07-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting industry-related story. One week after having the most successful movie in box office history, Disney announces that they're cutting back production and slashing jobs. Here's a story from the Globe and Mail about it.

Their logic? Perfect, by the diminished artistic standards of the modern film world. Essentially it boils down to "Why make movies that might flop when we can make a big theme-park movie that can spawn toys, video games and all kinds of residual markets?" Say goodbye to the Coen Brothers, say hello to Gore Verbinski.

Icky.

Summer Movie Binging

2006-07-19T09:08:00.001-07:00

In our little town, there's quite a bit of cultural activity, and no shortage of things to do, so this is not meant as a gratuitous swipe at semi-rural life, but the movie theatres, to coin a phrase, suck. I'm sure that there is a population base around here to support an "artsy" theatre, showing challenging or foriegn films, but this doesn't seem to be the opinion of our local theatre owners. There are a grand total of two theatres within a reasonable driving distance, neither of which is really worth the trip. The one in town is nice enough as a building, but the sound system is rank awful (one tinny MONO speaker behind a ragged and smeary screen) and they seem physically incapable of projecting a film in focus. The alternative, however, is a small "multiplex" one twon over that, while technically competent, seems physically incapable of showing a good film. Each week, they seem to pick the five worst films in general circulation and show them to cinema's bread and butter target audience: 15-year-old local boys.

Which is why I try to get to Vancouver (six hours drive away) every few months to go on a binge of first run movies. In the past week, I've managed to catch "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", "A Prairie Home Companion", "Superman Returns (IMAX version)" and "V for Vendetta". A good, hearty helping of summer movie, methinks. I'll be back next time with reviews, but reflecting on it now, maybe it's a good thing that our theatres have lost me as an audience member. Summer movies are, after all, junk food, the kind best enjoyed as a binge.

Movie Musings

2006-07-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers

I know what you're thinking: no one needs yet another blog featuring some amateur rambling about movies. Maybe I disagree, or maybe I'm not an amateur (I probably am guilty of rambling). I post on www.mindjack.com regularly, but here's where you'll see more personal thoughts on films, and hopefulyl intelligent and insightful observations concerning the medium of film.

I'll be posting more shortly. In the meantime, welcome.