Green Lantern, dir. Martin Campbell (2011)

Full disclosure: the Green Lantern is my favorite comic book hero.

So I’m giving Green Lantern the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of the heart, because it’s a rare film that refuses to cross the line into cheap gags and cynicism and this film refuses to do either. Most people who’ve seen it dismiss it as hokey, and just plain bad, but there seems to be a depth that Green Lantern aims for and, well, misses.

From what I’ve heard people find Green Lantern childish and, I’ll say it again, hokey, because of the Green Lantern’s power. It’s a ring that feeds off its wearer’s strength of will. The villain, Parallax, has power that feeds off of fear. The central question in the film is if willpower will overcome fear.  It’s a beautiful conflict that, unfortunately, never receives its full due.

I’m not a comic book guy – I don’t collect them, don’t really read them – though I did grow up with their mythologies as most who grew up at the end of the 20th Century inevitably did. Now, of course, they’ve exploded into a new direction with the comic book film adaptations. Most of these adaptations attempt to cover far too much content in one hundred and fifty minutes. What inevitably occurs is a narrative breakdown where character becomes sacrificed for CGI and plot. The core of the comic falls off that high cliff into fog like so many super-villains in the past. As Green Lantern‘s progresses, once Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) receives the ring and is introduced to the Green Lantern Corps, the film suffers from a complete narrative breakdown where we more or less are given episodes of Hal, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, who basically plays the Serena van der Woodsen of the DC Universe), and the nebbish doctor-come-villain Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard, who, unfortunately, is forced to scream high-pitched squeals of pain in 90% of his scenes). The only continuity throughout Green Lantern stems from Parallax, a villain that grows stronger and threatens to destroy Oa, the CGI orgy that’s the Green Lantern Corps’ home planet, and later Earth. A lot has to be squeezed into one film and what inevitably happens is that almost all of it – the story, the performances, the action – gets shortchanged.

The most successful comic book adaptations seem to feature superheroes who are not completely dependent upon their power, i.e. Batman and Iron Man. These films seem to have less trouble examining the heros as characters; they’re less superheroes and more flawed individuals. The association of superpower and humanity is what makes the films interesting. The exemplary films - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man – play back and forth with this association flawlessly. But the problem with those particular heroes is that they’re not true superheroes: both Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark crafted their power and are, at base, regular guys. Superman ain’t human. The X-Men can’t wake up one day and decide to hang it all up. Spider Man shoots a web whether he likes it or not.

What about Green Lantern? He’s human. His ability is what I’ve always admired: all he has to do is be brave. Unfortunately, action sequences are what earn tickets, and director Martin Campbell spends much of his energy playing with 3D (very well) instead of giving us real meat when it comes to emotion.With the insufficient attention, Campbell treads into campiness trying to rush earnestness. We modern moviegoers are a cynical bunch and will laugh at anything with a speck of unearned enthusiasm. Hal does overcome his fear and becomes a Green Lantern but by the end we’re still unclear what exactly that means for Hal Jordan.

Our very own Brian Barth has officially stepped on to the festival circuit!

His experimental film RICKETS (2010) will be premiering at the Boston Underground Film Festival ’11 and the Kansas City FilmFest ’11.

RICKETS explores a transformed landscape as it follows the simplest aesthetic narrative — white to black. The textures and rhythms of the image come from the serious digital distortion (achieved entirely in-camera) of the perfectly scenic setting of a boat trip down the Hudson River. The camera captures an alternate, underlying world, an almost microscopic vibration that pervades our existence.

Keep an eye out (for all our loyal Boston followers) – make sure to pick up some tickets for BUFF.

And while you’re there, be sure to also check out the extraordinary nunsploitation film Thy Kill Be Done (2010, dirs. Greg Hanson and Casey Reagan). It’s exactly what you think it is in the best way possible.

Our shoulders are all waxed and ready to rub. Come out and support Brian, the Company, Boston filmmaking, and, heck, just to see some really great film.

One of the great things about the internet is having access to things you wouldn’t ordinarily find.

In this case, it’s a 37 minute film by Dimitri Kirsanoff from 1925 called Ménilmontant.  I saw it in a screening at Bard with the understanding that it was an “extremely rare film to ever see” and to savor it because the likelihood was that I’d never see it again (unless I, you know, checked it out from the Bard film library).

Ha! Here it is presented for you, in these holiday times. Incidentally, it’s also Pauline Kael’s favorite film (she, too, claimed it was impossible to find). A real gem.

Dimitri Kirsanoff – Menilmontant (1925)

I’ll be posting updates on the blog periodically over the week, but if you want the play-by-play action follow me on Twitter.

At around 6:00 p.m. yesterday, the shorts program ended here at the Geneva Film Festival and I walked over to the bar across the street.  I sat down, got a drink, and on the back of the napkin began writing down the first things that came to mind after seeing my work screened (with other people’s hard, truthful work — but more on that in a later post). Here, unedited and unfiltered, is the list.

• Always keep story and quality in equal balance. Don’t try to over compensate one for the other.
• Never assume that your audience is coming to the theater wanting to think.
• Brevity is the soul of wit. So true.
• Spectacle helps.
• Better to have made a beautiful, meaningful film for $3000.00 than a kitschy, campy film with great production value for $65k.
• Don’t let your teeth rot.
• Never apologize for your work.
• Never get caught outgunned; always keep a shotgun hiding where no one suspects.
• Make something real.  Make something original.

I’ll post the complete write-up of the festival tomorrow on the flight back.

There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list.  We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.

Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.

I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals.  I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking.  The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.

Badlands (1973)

I liked Badlands, and I think what hit me most was stealing a glimpse of Malick before he became the enigma.  The early work of filmmakers is encouraging because you’re allowed to see how their styles and obsessions developed.

The tactile, film-school shooting style of the opening looks and feels like a great microfilm:  taking a tiny plot and carefully, almost invisibly inverting it to create a macronarrative.  All three of the films I watched did this (in very different ways).  This is the quality that most student films (which this technically was, since Malick began it while still at the AFI) strive for but miss. In fifteen minutes, a (believable) romance is sealed.  Well done.

The film is the most perfectly crafted vision of a nightmare.  Malick never goes for the easy blows that most horror films relish; there’s more terror in following the inexplicable to its inevitable end.  Martin Sheen’s Kit is a maniac who manages to sound like he’s giving real common sense advice every time he defends himself.  Sissy Spacek’s Holly is bizarrely, horrifyingly, passive.  What’s best about the film, is that it never injects any morality or ethos into the narrative.

I wasn’t crazy about Holly’s voiceover.  (I can hear the objections being screamed now.)  I cannot say that I know anything about the making of the film, but I felt it as tacked on at the last minute.  Whenever a character pontificates or meditates on the past events, beginning a sentence with “Little did I know…”, it reads as two-dimensional and clichéd. The voiceover improves through the film, and works for the ending.   Still, Malick’s wonderful voiceover in Days of Heaven leads me to appreciate his learning curve.

As with every Malick film, the acting is wonderfully understated, especially in the moments that normally permit chewing the scenery.  Warren Oates!  Best actor of the beginning of the 1970s.  This film along with Two-Lane Blacktop seals the deal.  And I’ll be honest: I’ve never really liked Sissy Spacek before, but I thought she was great here.  Martin Sheen, pre-Apocalypse Now, plays the best sociopath written into a film to date, most convincing when he shows the slightest bit of uncertainty and then overcompensates for it.

It’s not Malick’s masterpiece, but, like Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (which premiered along with Badlands at the 1973 New York Film Festival), it’s a great first film.

Scarecrow (1972)

I didn’t intentionally set out to watch two films from the same year. Scarecrow is a small gem.  It’s Old Joy thirty years ago, only with arguably deeper and more interesting characters.  Two losers hitch their way across the country: one’s a meek, make-em-laugh personality (Al Pacino’s Lionel), the other a strong douchebag with a permanent chip on his shoulder (Gene Hackman’s Max).

The first ten minutes are mindblowing.  The film opens with a long shot of Max walking through a field, climbing through a barbed wire fence, falling down an embankment, and coming to the side of the road.  He meets Lionel waiting there for a hitch, and as friendly as Lionel is, Max doesn’t want anything to do with him.  No cars come, and they’re waiting there all day.  We see all of this in less than fifteen shots.

Pacino playing comic relief is a rare sight and he does it flawlessly; and his slow progression towards disillusionment and tragedy makes for a great performance.  Hackman plays angry while avoiding all the normal tropes, and the film passes quickly.  It’s never hunkered down with larger-than-life emotional scenes.  It is a good note for directing actors: remove an actor’s conventional reactions to common situations and you have something instantly interesting.

The last thirty minutes are very “and now, the bad stuff happens”.  I’m not going to talk about the last thirty minutes in detail because we live in the society of spoiler alerts and the surprise of events should carry an emotional burden. I will say that everything that happens with Lionel’s family in Detroit, his chance to reconnect with the young son he’s never met, is earned and warranted.  The prison sequence after Max gets them both arrested, on the other hand, feels forced, although it’s both powerful and raw.

Gosford Park (2001)

Can we talk about how unflinchingly pitch perfect this film is?  There is never a moment of dialogue, never a shot, never a prop, never a reference, never a song, never a casting choice, never a sound cue that’s out of place.  This is easily Robert Altman’s best film.

The comparisons to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game are both apt and warranted– although I don’t believe, as some of the critical chatter out there suggests, that Altman, Bob Balaban (so marvelously deadpan in every role), and the inspired Julian Fellowes set out to create a remake.  Yes, both films rest on a shooting party consisting of wealthy aristocrats as plot, the eve of World War II as setting, and the aristocracy’s relationship to their servants as subject–but the films differ in how they employ the shared content. The Rules of the Game is concerned with what’s happening outside of the shooting party, while Gosford Park explores its characters and careful plot within the confines of the shooting party.

Every actor–not to sound hyperbolic–is perfect.  I recognize I’ve said that about each film, but Gosford Park wins the award for best ensemble (which, as it turns out, it did quite a few times during the awards season).  There’s no weak link.  It is a dream team of English actors: Clive Owen, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Maggie Smith, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Kelly Macdonald, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry.

[A brief side note/tangent that I have to get off my chest: has anyone else in the world seen the 1996 sci-fi epic Space Truckers? Charles Dance plays a weird half-human/half-robot guy in a really bizarre sex scene that involves electronic appendages.  It all came rushing back to me in an unfortunate Proustian moment when I recognized the actor.]

Anamorphic cinematography can be so beautiful and seamlessly integrated into a film.  The anamorphic in Gosford Park is anti-Wes Anderson.  Anderson’s gorgeous films are shot so that every image bends to cram painstakingly arranged subjects.  It’s intentional and arranged. Here, you almost forget about the cinematography; every scene was filmed with two cameras, simultaneously, so that actors never played for a camera.  Everyone was simultaneously recorded with wireless microphones.  Nothing seems arranged, but the anamorphic lenses allow enough information into every frame and set-up (not to mention light to allow for deep focus) that the dialogue and plot fits into it.  It would have been very easy to let this film slip into a theatrical talk-fest.  That’s a mumblecore choice, where the formal filmmaking takes a backseat to the talking.  Not so here.  It’s quintessentially cinematic thanks to great editing, superb direction, and wonderful cinematography.

The only thing I can hold against it is the extent to which Stephen Fry’s Inspector gets pushed to the side.  I streamed it on Netflix, so perhaps there were more Fry-heavy scenes on the DVD that were cut from the finished film, but I felt that once the Inspector arrived he disappeared just as quickly.

*     *     *

That wraps up this first installment.  I have no idea what I’ll be watching next, so leave some suggestions in the comments and if I haven’t seen them I’ll check it out.

38 percent of all catastrophic home-fires (the ones that burned the house to the ground) in the United States in 2007 were started from grease/oil fires.  Something that starts from a small pot can expand with fierce terror to literally burn your life away.

The moment of ignition, the pfoof!, is important because humans have been programmed with an Oh Shit trigger that comes in the face of immediate and terrifying uncertainty (like accidentally creating a fire).  But this trigger often makes us forego what could be the simplest fix for self-preservation.  And the simplest fix for a grease fire?  Lids.  Cover the pot, remove from heat, and wait.

I’m just as guilty as the rest because a few days ago I did create a grease fire and didn’t take the simplest fix (nor, thankfully, did I burn my small apartment, with my girlfriend and I still inside, as well as the entire apartment building, into ash).  I hit the Oh Shit Trigger and somehow my mind flew back to 6th Grade science and I poured an entire bag of flour over the pot.

Did it put out the fire?  Yes.  Did it stop the flames from engulfing my home?  Yes.  Did it cause an extra twenty minutes of clean up before I could restart the process of cooking the beef stew?  Yes.

The very existence of the lid, the singular device to put out the fire, is at once both comforting and disconcerting.  We’re hardwired with survivalist instincts with quick, healthy dashes of adrenaline and panic to force us to regress back into the neolithic cerebellum region and, simply, survive.  The lid in the grease fire is something different, something more evolved.

Lids are everywhere, especially in filmmaking.  But in the long road of learning to make films, a director tends to either forgo or forget them entirely.  More often than not the kitchen becomes covered in flour and you acutely forget what you set out to cook in the first place.

I’m not talking about actors arriving late on set, running out of time on a shoot, low lighting, bad sound, or any of the common problems in filmmaking.  No, I’m speaking of the Big Kahunas — the frightening possibilities that can break a director’s spine in seven places.  Running out of film on a shoot.  Losing an actor the day before filming begins.  Forgetting developed film in a taxi.  Breaking a hard drive with the sole copy of the data within.  Directors get panicked easily.  Becoming a skilled director is all about is learning to (quickly) dissect the problems before reacting to them; to think to reach for the lid.  Cover, wait, and move on.

A short film usually takes about a year to make, start to finish; a feature takes perhaps three from script to final cut.  That’s a large window for some fires to pop up in.  And they will.  Learning to remember the lids saves a film from the abyss of rash decisions and pathetic compromises.  Never become the director crying on the curb. I’ve seen this happen twice.  (None of them have been Company directors, thankfully.)  But knowing where you keep the lids . . . now that’s the real challenge, isn’t it?

]]> http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/lids/feed/ 0 http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/oh-right/ http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/oh-right/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:55:37 +0000 Adam Hirsch http://sainteliotandco.com/?p=1504 The Seitz brothers were commissioned by L Magazine to create a video essay on the decade in film.  It’s in two parts, and great.

If this doesn’t get you excited about filmmaking, I don’t know what will.

Part One:

Part Two:

“Remember that lost time does not return.”

It also covers the repercussions of her work, told in two interweaving narratives: Julia’s life in France and, forty years later, a neurotic writer-to-be living in New York named Julie who decides to spend a year cooking her way through Mastering the Art, write a blog about it, and inexplicably spends every single evening drinking several martinis without any dire effects. Meryl Streep, as always, is impeccable as Julia Child and Amy Adams is great as Julie. Although they both are extremely empathetic protagonists, it’s Julia who always manages to be the one in power. Julia draws meaning from life out of excellence; Julie draws meaning out of life from the replication of Julia’s excellence.

and gastronomic cookbooks — Child’s in particular — is that the former insist on the individual taking the lessons and making something new and unique; the latter asks that the cook follow the directions in order to produce a standard form of a dish.

Roberto Bolaño was known to say that it was the writer’s duty to plunge headfirst into the void, into the darkness. I like to think that Funny People is the film where Judd Apatow walked to the edge of the void, looked down, and decided that it was enough. The director said he wanted to make a movie about death, but I wouldn’t have known it from watching Funny People. The film is made up of moments where Apatow plays chicken with the serious — and he’s the one to veer first. It follows much like the scene when the self-absorbed pseudo-star played by Jason Schwartzman shares the story of his grandfather’s death, only to be greeted with jokes by his friends.

But laughter, after all, is the best medicine. Who can fault the man behind Knocked Up for putting some funny in the casket? And if Funny People can’t be a movie about death, maybe it can be a movie about stand-up comics. Oh, that would be a good one. Comedians have the kinds of easily discoverable psychological traumas they like to talk about with James Lipton. They also hate themselves, which is unique. They talk about cocks a lot.

The most interesting moments in the movie have to do with the nature of comedy itself — in this sense, the film is not all that different from last year’s The Wrestler, which made its central theme the sacrificial quality of the entertainer. Funny People brushes the surface of that. Then it turns its head to something else.

3.

Don’t be fooled, though. Lots of distractions make for a long movie. Seth Rogan’s character needs a girlfriend. No one needs anymore proof that he is consistently saccharine. I heard Billy Collins say that when he was writing a poem he sometimes liked to throw a dog in there, like someone would put some flowers in the corner. I suppose people pull their content from different places. Judd Apatow seems to be thinking this way. The content that could have been drained from the relationship between Rogan and Sandler isn’t enough. No, better to have a woman. It gives them more opportunities to talk about their balls.

4.

Superbad, which is in some form or another associated with Apatow, had an amazing level of cock talk. It was Glenn Gould level genius. There was something nearly Sirkian in that film about the barrage of profanity — something that made you step back and reconsider what was being presented to you. It made you realize that that movie was one of the most heartbreaking homosexual love stories in recent memory (no, I’m not kidding). In Funny People, though, it’s not that the characters are talking about their small to average size members to distract themselves. The film is doing it to distract you. And it leads you to realize that Funny People can’t seem to talk about what it wants to talk about.

5.

Also, there is a love story. Why not, I guess. Apatow is uninterested in earning the notes of the love story — he just seems to hit them with a lot of tears and hope the audience will too. They won’t.

6.

Someone used to say about Truffaut that sometimes he had an idea and made a movie, and then sometimes he didn’t have an idea but he made a movie anyway. At the very least, Apatow has a few ideas. But Funny People seems incapable or uninterested in sorting them out. It has some things to say. I think I can make out the shadows of his points — the nature of stand-up comedy is the most compelling — but that’s not enough.

7.

The film isn’t honest about its accomplishments. It’s not as courageous as it thinks it is. Remember Groundhog Day? That’s a bold film, and it’s about something. Watching Funny People, I got the feeling there were a lot of options — Sandler could have just played someone named Adam Sandler, the film could have started towards the end of his disease, Sandler and his lost love could have never confessed their feelings to one another — it could have been sadder, funnier, smarter. It didn’t feel like Judd Apatow ever had any of those thoughts.