Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Cleo From 5 to 7


C'est la Semaine de la Nouvelle Vague française! Toute la semaine, nous allons voir des films de cette période révolutionnaire et les plus influents dans l'histoire de certains de ses plus grands réalisateurs.

seen online via YouTube
11.8.11

One reason why I like movies in general is that they provide an opportunity to see other places, both around the country and around the world. Cleo From 5 to 7 is practically a tourist's guide to Paris, even if it is the Paris of the 60s. Director Agnes Varda takes you all around the city in this real-time film, all through its streets, restaurants, apartments, and parks. In talking about Bob le Flambeur on Monday, I mentioned how director Jean-Pierre Melville was among the first French directors to shoot on location. Well, that turned out to be one of the defining characteristics of the movement, though a lot of the time it was simply cheaper to shoot that way.

In the movie, Cleo's a pop singer who has been diagnosed with cancer, and she spends most of the film trying to either forget about it or to come to terms with it before she has to go back to the doctor for an official confirmation. It all takes place in one afternoon, and we see her hanging out with her maid, her boyfriend, her songwriters, and ultimately, a soldier she meets in a park. Story-wise, it's paper thin. It's basically a character study, and Cleo is, by turns, petulant, hysterical, frivolous, frightened, and contemplative - but learning you probably have a terminal disease will do that to you.



Cleo is a well-crafted movie. One gets the impression that Varda was willing to try different things, and for the most part, they work. The opening credits scene is set in a room where a fortune teller is reading tarot cards for our heroine, and Varda does a curious thing: the shots of the cards on the table are in color, but only those shots - the rest of the movie is in black and white. The fortune that Cleo receives sets the tone for the rest of the movie, so it's an important scene, but I found the alternating color and B&W gimmicky.

Much more impressive was the camerawork and editing. The street scenes are impressive in themselves, but I also get the impression Varda's cinematography and editing was used to convey emotion in places. For instance, in the scene with the songwriters, at one point the camera sways back and forth from them to Cleo as they sing, which was amusing.


So what do we know about Varda? Well, while she broke through around the same period as the French New Wave, the history books place her as part of an alternate group called the Left Bank (left as in politics) that were characterized as more Bohemian and experimental. Still, the Left Bank often collaborated with the FNW group, and they were endorsed by the seminal FNW magazine Cahiers du Cinema (which we'll talk about later this week). Varda's filmmaker husband Jacques Demy was also considered part of the Left Bank.


Cleo was Varda's breakthrough hit, and she even got Jean-Luc Godard to make a cameo appearance in it. He's part of a silent short film that Cleo watches at one point. Varda's first husband, Antoine Bourseiller, also appears as the soldier. Varda's still around; her last film was in 2008.


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Auparavant, dans la Semaine de Nouvelle Vague française:

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Weighing Serkis' Oscar chances

...Fox's campaign for Serkis will test Oscar voters' willingness to acknowledge actors' work in the increasingly common performance capture field, in which the actions of human actors are recorded and used to animate digital character models. In Serkis' case, artists at the visual effects house Weta Digital transformed him from a curly-haired Englishman into a knuckle-dragging chimpanzee. Like John Hurt's Oscar-nominated performance in "The Elephant Man" in 1980, in which he was rendered unrecognizable by heavy prosthetic makeup, acknowledging the performance would require academy voters to take note of an actor without ever seeing his face.
So it's official: Fox will mount an Oscar campaign for Andy Serkis, in his computer-enhanced, performance-captured role as the super-intelligent ape Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Once you take a few moments to fully understand how the P-cap process works and how it was applied to Serkis' role in Rise, I think you'll agree with me that his was one of the best acting performances of the year. Some people say that it's more the novelty of the performance (and the chance to make history with it) rather than the performance itself that's inspiring all this Oscar talk, which, I admit, is possible. Still, he made you believe in the character. Though not human, Caesar had human-like traits that grew and evolved over the course of the movie, and eventually you cared about what happened to him. Serkis made that possible. As much as I've talked about P-cap, it still amazes me that it's even possible. It truly is movie magic.

But can he get nominated? That's the big question. Let's look at his competition. Movie City News' Gurus o' Gold is a collection of the top Oscar prognosticators on the web. Every few weeks or so, they put their heads together and attempt to pick the frontrunners based on screenings, word of mouth, and intangibles. As of November 1, Serkis ranks 15th on their list of Supporting Actor candidates.

Currently atop the list is a pair of old-timers: Christopher Plummer for Beginners and Max von Sydow for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Both have been around for decades, both are deeply admired as master thespians by the Academy, and both have never won Oscars. There will likely be a great deal of sentimental support for both men, which often translates into votes. I would count on both of them getting in.

Moving down the chart, the Gurus also predict Albert Brooks for Drive, Kenneth Branagh for My Week With Marilyn, and Jonah Hill for Moneyball. It's quite possible that at least two of these three can make it in. Branagh is playing an historical figure, actor Laurence Olivier, something the Academy always appreciates, and he has the rep. Brooks was very good in Drive, and as a funnyman, he'll come off great when he works the talk shows and Academy screenings. Hill played a pivotal role in a successful commercial film that will likely get a lot of Oscar love. The rest (before you reach Serkis) are mostly roles in films that are touted as surefire Oscar contenders in major categories, such as The Descendants, J. Edgar and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Honestly, I believe that no matter how much education Fox supplies on the mechanics of P-cap, Serkis' chances at a nomination are slim. It's still too much of a leap for most people to accept that what Serkis was doing was acting a role, the same way James Franco and everyone else in Rise was. There's also evidence that suggests the rendition from Serkis to Caesar was not perfect, and that's certain to have an influence.

Still, I believe we're only gonna see more roles like this in the future, not less, and at some point there will be a P-cap role that will be harder to dismiss. Naturally, I don't want all acting to go the way of P-cap; no one wants that and I doubt there's any danger of that ever happening. I do think this allows actors to expand the boundaries of what they can do in a movie, and if I were an actor, I'd find that exciting. Perhaps in time the Academy will agree.

Thoughts?

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Related:
The state of performance-capture filmmaking
Is performance-capture filmmaking animation?

Monday, November 7, 2011

Bob le Flambeur


C'est la Semaine de la Nouvelle Vague française! Toute la semaine, nous allons voir des films de cette période révolutionnaire et les plus influents dans l'histoire de certains de ses plus grands réalisateurs.

seen online via YouTube
11.5.11

I've never understood the compulsion to gamble with money. (Yes, I know we all take gambles of some sort in our everyday lives, be it on a lover, a career, or what have you. I'm not talking about that.) I always thought that when you've grown up without much of it, it makes you wanna hold onto it that much harder, certainly not recklessly throw it away on games of chance. Sure, it's tempting to do something as ordinary and common as play a lottery ticket - I've certainly thought about doing it more than once - but it's so easy for something that starts so innocently to become an addiction. I'm reminded of that funny Albert Brooks movie Lost in America, where one afternoon at the roulette wheel turns Julie Hagerty into a gambling fiend.



Competitiveness, I understand, of course. The drive to want to beat the other guy in a challenge of some sort - sure, that makes sense. To not know when to quit, however, especially when one could put that money towards much more useful things (like a nest-egg), well, that's something that oughta put the fear of God into people, but it doesn't. Not always, anyway. That's why it always amazes me whenever I see professional gamblers playing poker or whatever and  handling thousands of dollars of money at a time. One would have to be fearless to risk so much money on a game.


The title character of Bob le Flambeur is cool at the gambling table to the point of icy. Dude's a small-time hood who has spent the past twenty years on the straight and narrow, until he gets drawn into a supposedly can't-miss heist of a local casino. This film takes a while to really get going, but once it does, it's not bad, although Bob didn't strike me as interesting a character as, say, Paul Newman in The Hustler, or Edward Norton in Rounders




Bob was directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, and it was considered highly influential on subsequent French New Wave filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (both of whom we'll get to later in the week). Melville was notable for shooting on location, which was a rarity in French cinema at the time (mid-50s). Indeed, there are very nice street scenes of the Paris neighborhood Montmartre throughout the film. Plus, he had his own homemade studio in which parts of Bob were shot. The FNW was as much about economy of filmmaking as anything else. The auteur theory of filmmaking, which elevates the director over and above everyone else as the creator whose unique style binds the film together, was taking shape around this time, and Melville, by virtue of his working outside of the studio system, fit nicely into this new paradigm. We'll go into more detail about auteurism later this week as well.


Unfortunately, I'm struggling with a cold as I write this, and as a result it's a little hard to think about details from a movie I saw two days ago, so that's all I have to say about Bob. This is gonna make watching these films difficult, since I have to pay attention to the subtitles if I wanna know what's going on. I'll just have to muddle through somehow.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Far From Heaven

Far From Heaven
last seen online via Hulu
11.3.11

I'm gonna pass on writing about the racial aspects of Far From Heaven because, frankly, they're pretty obvious - bigotry existed in the 50s, BIG SURPRISE - and instead talk about a concept whose inner workings have long eluded me: gaydar.


In this movie, Dennis Quaid's character, Frank, is held up as a paragon of All-American masculinity and virtue, 50s style, but it turns out that he's secretly gay, and try as he might, he can't resist the yearnings he has for other men that threaten to undermine his marriage. We see him eying younger men, and sometimes they give him the eye right back. 

What interests me is how gay people recognized each other back then. Today, gays are much more out in the open and Western society in general is more accepting of them now than fifty years ago (all things being relative, of course). Back then, though, it was a lot harder. Nothing about Frank screams gay. He's basically the man in the gray flannel suit, the picture of the 50s suburban working-class man - which, of course, is the point, since, as he explains at one point, he has suppressed his homosexual longings most of his life. And yet other gay men can still mark him as one of their own.



It should come as no surprise that modern science has tried to find a biological basis for gaydar, but it's unlikely this sort of information was common knowledge back then. (Hair whorls? Really?) In the movie, it's unclear how exactly Frank knows a dude is gay. We see him looking fixedly at a guy or guys, and presumably, gears start turning in his head. He's never wrong, either. I'd imagine he'd be taking a huge risk every time he went after these guys. God forbid he pegged the wrong dude as gay who wasn't, like the son of a politician or a policeman - one can imagine how deep into trouble he'd be then - yet he clearly felt it was worth the risk. However, I trust the judgment of writer-director Todd Haynes, a gay man, and these scenes didn't ring false to me.


Of course, in some cases, there's little to no room for doubt. The movie acknowledges that in one scene where Patricia Clarkson tells Julianne Moore about a New York art dealer who is so obviously "that way," and when we see him later on at an gallery exhibit - yep, he's gay! Sometimes the stereotypes fit.


When I talked about Paris is Burning, I mentioned how the gay people in that film discuss dressing like straights as a way of proving that they can "play the game" as well as anyone else. It's an intriguing idea because the way they see it, it's not hiding from straight society so much as mocking it, in a sense. This, however, requires an awareness and an acceptance of oneself as gay, something Frank doesn't have in Heaven. He really is hiding, and yet he can't completely conceal his gay identity. Because Haynes crafts this film in the style of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, this is seen as a tragedy, but - and I'm sure Haynes would agree - the fact that Frank can now be himself and not live a lie is undoubtedly a happy ending.


A brief aside: it was a bit of a shock to see Viola Davis as a maid again. When I first saw Heaven, I didn't know who she was, and of course her role here is nowhere near as prominent as it is in The Help, but I couldn't help but make comparisons.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Being Elmo

Being Elmo
seen @ IFC Center, New York NY
11.1.11

Okay, first of all, can I just say how absolutely TERRIFYING this poster for Being Elmo is? I mean, look at it. That damn muppet looks like he's been summoned from the lower regions of hell by Kevin Clash for the specific purpose of vivisecting you and offering you up as a sacrifice to the Elder Gods. It looks like a poster for a 70s grindhouse horror movie. Seriously, what were they thinking when they put this together? This is without a doubt the wrong image you wanna present for what is a positive, uplifting, feel-good movie. Am I the only one who thinks so? I doubt it...

Anyway. Sesame Street. I watched it as a kid, like everyone else. Snufflufagus was kinda scary, Cookie Monster was awesome, and Big Bird was sweet. I don't remember too much about watching the show, just a few scattered memories here and there, so I can't say to what extent I learned stuff from it. I'm sure I did. (I have better memories of watching The Electric Company, and I definitely learned from that show, but that's for another post.)

Elmo, of course, became a star long after I had stopped watching Sesame Street, and I remember being annoyed at seeing him everywhere after he blew up. I suppose I thought at the time that he was the show's answer to Barney, from what little I saw of him. Still, I didn't care too much. It wasn't until I started hearing about this documentary and saw that Elmo's muppeteer was a black man that I took any interest.



I never had any great dream to make muppets or puppets like Clash did. If anything, Being Elmo shows that it's one thing to be able to make a cool-looking puppet, but another thing altogether to create a personality for it. We see footage of Clash as a teenager hand-sewing puppets and learning about the materials that go into making them and he certainly has a talent for that, one developed at an early age. To bring these puppets to life, however, takes something extra, and in seeing the teenaged Clash make voices for them and animate them - that, to me, was the truly remarkable part. There's one scene where he explains to another muppeteer the subtle differences in showing expression on a muppet, and you can tell how great an expert he has become at it, how he makes it an art form.

I have to admit, I'm disappointed that Being Elmo is only playing at the IFC. If ever a movie deserves a wider audience, this is one - black audiences in particular need to see it. We get to see Clash's family, his humble beginnings as a poor kid in Baltimore, and how he single-mindedly pursued his dream. That's a story that transcends race, but it's also a story with resonance and relevance for black audiences in particular, and it's unfortunate that no theaters in Harlem or downtown Brooklyn or Jamaica are showing this.



I don't think I've talked about the IFC here. The IFC is a relatively recent addition to the West Village, replacing the old Waverly Theater. (I saw Scream with Jenny at the old Waverly!) It's not as aesthetically pleasing as other art house theaters, but the seats are comfortable, the bathrooms are clean and the selection of films is always top-notch. The last film I saw here was Antichrist (NOT MY IDEA!! Jenny really wanted to see it - and even then, we almost walked out on it). Plus, the IFC sells these really cool T-shirts that have the names of foreign directors in the style of heavy metal logos - for instance, "Ozu" in an Ozzy (as in Osborne) logo, or "Von Trier" in a Van Halen logo. One day I'll have to buy one of those.


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Related:
The frog prince: The legacy of Jim Henson

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Five juvenile ways to get adults to see 'Shame'

...Hollywood is in agreement that Shame... represents the most important moment in years for the ghettoized NC-17 rating. Translated, the rating means "patently adult. No children allowed," according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which runs the ratings program with the National Association of Theatre Owners. Technically speaking, the rating means no children under 17 allowed, period. Shame is destined to push the boundaries of what's acceptable in the eyes of American moviegoers, as well as the willingness of theater owners to carry such fare and advertisers to carry promos for the movie. 

"I think NC-17 is a badge of honor, not a scarlet letter. We believe it is time for the rating to become usable in a serious manner," says Gilula. "The sheer talent of the actors and the vision of the filmmaker are extraordinary. It's not a film that everyone will take easily, but it certainly breaks through the clutter and is distinctive and original. It's a game changer."
Fox Searchlight, a studio that has delivered some of the finest movies of the past decade, including Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire, is prepared to put its money where its mouth is by not only accepting the NC-17 rating the MPAA slapped onto the controversial Michael Fassbender movie Shame, but using it as a selling point in a bold attempt to de-stigmatize the rating. More power to 'em, I say. In a culture that is perfectly okay with ever-escalating levels of gore and violence in films but shrinks in horror at even the suggestion of sex, I hope their efforts will begin to make people - especially theater owners - think twice about that sort of thing. How will they go about it? We don't know for sure just yet, but they could do a lot worse than take these suggestions:

- Reverse psychology. "Watch this movie? No, you don't wanna do that. Ladies, you don't have any interest in seeing this totally suave and sexy actor whom you loved in Jane Eyre earlier this year completely naked. Fellas, don't waste your time with a movie where you can see that hottie from Drive completely naked. Cinephiles, don't even bother seeking out this film from a critically-acclaimed director that took Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival and blew 'em away in Toronto. No, it's okay, really. I hear Adam Sandler's cross-dressing in his new movie. You go see that instead. It's fine."


- Taunting. "You don't wanna see this movie? What's the matter - chicken?"



- Guilt. "How can you not want to see this movie? Don't you know how fortunate you are to live in a country where we can see naked people whenever we want? Why, there are some countries that don't have any naked people at all. America's founding fathers fought and died for the right to see naked people, a right you should get down on your knees and give thanks for daily! You should consider it your patriotic duty to go see Shame, because if you don't... the terrorists have already won."


- Fear. "All your friends are gonna see it. Your boss is gonna see it. Way I hear it, he's gonna go with that dorky brownnoser who used to work in your department. Yeah, he's a dick, but he's a dick who makes more than you now. Bad enough your boss already thinks you're a little... peculiar for not coming to the staff bowling nights. Besides, what else are you gonna have to talk about on Monday morning - how the dryer at the laundromat broke on you again?"


- Bribery. "See Shame and we'll stop remaking 80s movies. Well, okay, maybe we can't speak for all the other studios out there, but how about this: see Shame and we'll make sure the next Die Hard movie is rated R like the last one should have been. How's that?"


I think those would work, wouldn't you?