Archive for the ‘Film’ Category
Spare the spoilers
For millennia, we struggled with insufficient information. Now our bane is getting too much.
I speak, of course, of the spoiler — learning something before you wanted to know it, in a way that ruins the pleasure of the journey.
After all, when we consume fiction, we don’t just want a summary of the plot. You don’t get the same thrill reading a Wikipedia plot summary as you do letting it unfold. We like to enjoy the moments as they unfold, to discover twists and turns when the author intended, not all at once.
For example, I’ve never seen M. Night Shymalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” Why bother? I learned about the movie’s twist well before I even considered seeing the movie. I’d probably still enjoy watching it, but losing the thrill of figuring it out has sapped any motivation to go out and go see it. And in a world where there’s always another entertainment option, that’s a death knell.
Monday night miscellany, part 5
None of my longer posts are coming together, so I write short to break the writer’s block:
— Food for thought: The proposed Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would replace our current calendar — jury-rigged to fit the unequal revolution and rotation of the Earth — with a fixed calendar, where every day of the year always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas would always be on a Sunday. Americans would always celebrate their independence on a Wednesday, while the French would do the same on a Saturday a week and a half later.
To equalize out the calendar, Hanke-Henry would add an extra week every five or six years.
Moreover, they’d also abolish time zones. All time would be UTC — so when it’s 0700 hours in London and the sun is coming up, it’s also 0700 in New York City but the middle of the night, and also 0700 in Honolulu — and the late evening. 0700 hours would always be evening in Honolulu, just as it would always be morning in London.
(It’s unclear how Hanke and Henry expect people to function — whether they want people to continue working 0900 to 1700 every day for synchronization, even if that means people in some parts of the world become nocturnal, or if they want people to continue setting their schedules largely by the sun but just calling it different times, or some combination of both.)
It’s a proposal that’s a big step towards the “rational” and away from the “natural,” and I’m not sold at all that it would be an improvement. But it’s at least thought-provoking.
A baker’s dozen short
On “The Hobbit,” dwarves and why Peter Jackson is right to deviate from Tolkien’s classic
As a fan of literature, I rarely root for a film adaptation to make wholesale changes to a beloved book. And yet strangely, for among my most-beloved books, those of J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m in the position cheering for major changes to plot, theme and tone in the upcoming adaptations of “The Hobbit.”
I was a huge fan of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” both books and movies. Peter Jackson’s movies took a lot of liberties with the books, generally focusing more on action than the often meandering travelogue of Tolkien’s prose, and cutting out sequences both extraneous (Tom Bombadil) and cool but probably unworkable (the Scourging of the Shire). Characters were tweaked and plots rearranged, with battle sequences extended far beyond Tolkien’s brief descriptions and characters given extra adventures and conflict.
While some purists complained, I largely didn’t mind. For the better part of four years I obsessed over the films, tracking news as they were shot and produced and then watching them multiple times, in theaters and on DVD, after release.
But anyone who thought Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” played fast and loose with the original had better hurry up and hook up a dynamo in Wolvercote Cemetery, because Professor Tolkien is about to be spinning madly in his grave.
Monday night miscellany, part 4
In which I really mean it when I say I’m going to be (relatively) brief:
— As a left-handed person, I was morbidly fascinated to see a throwaway paragraph in a review of a book on left-handedness with a theory on the origins of the southpaw-dom that I hadn’t heard before. There are, researchers say, odd connections between left-handedness and twins:
Not only is left-handedness twice as common among twins as among regular siblings, but left-handers are twice as likely as right-handers to produce twins.This eerie link lies at the heart of another modern theory: … that “being a monozygotic [from the same zygote, or "identical"] twin is a precondition of being left-handed.” In other words, only someone who has had a twin in utero can be truly left-handed. The twins are mirror images of one another; one is left-handed, and the other right-handed. Of course, left-handedness doesn’t require that one ultimately be born with a twin. If only one fetus results at the end of term, that means the other died in the womb and was absorbed by the mother: a “vanishing twin.”
In other words, if you’re a lefty and don’t have a twin, it means you DID in the womb — but your twin embryo didn’t make it. Plenty of fertilized embryos don’t make it through the early stages of pregnancy, for whatever reasons, though scientists don’t know exactly how common this is. As the book (summarized by the reviewer) notes, there’s major reasons to doubt this hypothesis and a very real lack of evidence to back it up.
But in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, I may run with this: being a lefty means I had an identical twin for a few days or weeks until he fell off the mortal coil. OR WAS PUSHED… (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
Hollywood’s Rule of Pairs
Anyone watching the recent glut of sequels and remakes pouring out of Hollywood lately doesn’t need to be reminded that the movie-making capital of the country is sometimes a little starved of original movie ideas. It’s so bad that the rare idea gets immediately snapped up — snapped up, I’ve observed, by more than one studio.
It’s what I call the “Rule of Pairs.” Inevitably, Hollywood will take two bites at the same apple if it looks good enough.
I think I first noticed the Rule in 1998, when “Deep Impact” and “Armaggedon” hit theaters within months of each other, both about giant space rocks on collision courses with Earth. That same year, Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and Dreamworks’ “Antz” were each released, both computer-animated films about insects.
In 2001 Hollywood made the move into epic fantasy with two simultaneous franchises: “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter.” In 2004 the ancient Greeks were on the menu, with “Alexander” and “Troy.” Flash forward a few years and there were two movies about, of all things, author Truman Capote (“Capote” and “Infamous”).
Movie review: “Contagion”
The title of the 2011 movie “Contagion” refers to the deadly infectious disease sweeping over the world that drives its plot — but also to the social contagion that spreads even farther and faster than the killer virus.
In fact, it’s this second aspect of “Contagion” that’s by far the most interesting. As an enemy, the virus is about as inhuman as you can get — it infects you, or it doesn’t. People with the virus die, or they don’t. Treatment appears to be largely ineffective — the drive of the movie’s plot is towards finding a vaccine to prevent transmission of the MEV-1 virus, not finding a way to keep people with the virus alive.
But the world’s population who are not infected still have to survive until they can be inoculated. And for many, the social contagion proves a more immediate danger than the actual virus.
Dub-stop
Here’s a pet peeve: I can’t stand bad voice dubs.
Whether it’s a foreign movie or a native English production that’s just a little out of sync, if the sound on a video doesn’t match the movements of the mouth I get uncomfortable.
Movie Review: “Cowboys & Aliens”
The new movie “Cowboys & Aliens” makes a great show of playing with film conventions, but the film’s most striking departure from convention involved neither six-shooters nor space ships. Instead, it was this: Jon Favreau’s camera spends more time lingering on star Daniel Craig’s chest than it does on co-star Olivia Wilde’s.
Olivia Wilde (left) and Daniel Craig in "Cowboys & Aliens"
The male star regularly finds himself bereft, in whole or in part, of his shirt, giving audiences plenty of time to gawk at James Bond’s chiseled pecs. Wilde, in contrast, usually wears a chaste 19th Century dress (though her split-leg riding style might have been plenty scandalous in the time period), and even when the plot contrives to leave Wilde naked we only see her from behind or from the neck up.
Given Hollywood’s decades of experience objectifying female bodies, this turnabout is all the more startling given that it takes place in what is little more than splashy popcorn flick with a few pretensions.
I liked “Cowboys and Aliens.” I didn’t love it, and I’m tempted to downgrade it because it failed to rise up into the more rarified space I had prepared for it. But what’s the point of doing that for a summer action movie?
Just how uncanny is that valley?
Steven Spielberg unleashed the full trailer for his upcoming motion-capture epic “The Adventures of Tintin” yesterday, and it’s brilliant. Or awful.
It depends on who you ask.
Tintin and Snowy
I’ve rarely seen such a polarizing reaction to movie trailer (embedded below). “Tintin,” based on the beloved (though not so much in the U.S.) series of comic books by Belgian artist Hergé, is about a globetrotting young reporter (never mind that he never seems to get around to filing a story) with a knack for getting into trouble. As he races from peril to peril in the mid-century, pre-war setting, he’s accompanied by the hard-drinking, “hard”-swearing Captain Haddock — whose blue streak is amusingly bowdlerized with nautical techno-babble like “billions of blistering barnacles” — his faithful dog Snowy, and an assortment of pistols, seaplanes, chloroform, fast cars, explosions and other stock of a bygone day’s pulp adventures.
The upcoming movie, directed by Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, is produced using motion capture technology, of the kind used to create Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” movies and the Na’vi in “Avatar,” but in n animated style more similar to the recent films of Robert Zemeckis (“A Christmas Carol,” “The Polar Express”). And it’s the motion capture that appears to be the sticking point.
Movie review: “The Secret of Kells”
In 2009, Irish director Tomm Moore released an idiosyncratic animated film, “The Secret of Kells.” It was widely praised by critics, but apparently made less than a million dollars at the box office.
Having watched the film tonight, I understand both why that is and why that’s such a shame.
To start with, “Kells” looks like no other cartoon out there. Its art is highly stylized, evoking the flat perspective of medieval illumination — such as illustrated the real “Book of Kells” on which the movie’s story centers. Frequently, the images coalesce into simple geometry with an emphasis on curves: circles, arches and swirls repeat endlessly, whether in the human abbey:
Abbott Cellach (left) and his nephew Brendan stand in the planning room for the Abbey of Kells in the 2009 movie "The Secret of Kells."
or in the wild forest beyond:
Brendan (left) stands atop a tree with the forest spirit Aisling in the 2009 movie "The Secret of Kells."
Witness, too, the striking use of perspective. Lack of realistic perspective was one of the highlights of pre-Renaissance art, something the “Kells” animation deliberately recreates. It’s a little jarring, at first, but eventually it becomes quite charming.
