Anderson in the ascendant

It will be difficult to write anything new about Moonrise Kingdom (2012).  It's the kind of film that makes people who want to write about film want to write about it.  I will try to make my own observations, but it is unlikely that they will be unique to me.

The signature Anderson shot is what I call the Dollhouse shot, in which Anderson's camera roams through divided spaces to show how they are connected (and how they are on a set, which has an anti-realistic effect).  I first noticed it in Life Aquatic, and Mr. Fox is full of them.  But Moonrise Kingdom begins with one. (The picture on the right is a set photo from this sequence.  It is really a photo, though when reproduced in a small size it really looks a Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post.) I am reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock found it necessary to put his own cameo earlier and earlier in the film so as to get it over with and leave fans undistracted to follow the film.  In Moonrise Kingdom it may have the same function, as well as being a somewhat defiant setting of tone.  "This IS a Wes Anderson film!  You know what that means, and I'm not going to apologize for it."

It is a little appalling to see so many critics jump on Mr. Anderson for having a distinct style.  That doesn't seem to bother them with Hemingway or Faulkner or Dickens or Flannery O'Connor or Raymond Carver.  It doesn't bother them with Hitchcock or Welles or even Spielberg, who has a very particular way of using his camera.  But because Anderson uses conventions from other media, including the fine arts, illustration and the theater, the critics are all jumping up and down and turning blue!  How dare he have a distinctive voice!  All the really good directors are anonymous journeyman utterly without any element of personal expression.

There is a reason critics get excited this way.  They are all Salieris.  Third-rate uncreative nonentities, fully aware that the subject of their scribblings will far outlast those scribblings.  They are also mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons.

From this categorization I separate the valuable journalists and historians who deal in fact, like David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.  These are the kind of film writers who literally count frames.  Some writer who is obsessive in just that way should tell us if Wes Anderson has ever done a push-in with his camera.  The camera always seems to move laterally, and when there is movement in depth it seems to progress in a straight line from the horizon line toward the viewer.  There are no diagonals in Andersonland, and there are no dolly movements in towards the actors.  Too emphatic, perhaps?  Or maybe the Coen Brothers used up the quota of push-ins before Mr. Anderson could get to them.

Two things Anderson gets right that few filmmakers do.  One is very early love.  There is a wonderful mix of narcissistic unawareness of one's actions and their possible consequences and self-conscious detachment in that first fine fall into passion.  At the same time a person is engaged in headlong and reckless acts to pursue the object of passion, one is also aware that First Love is a landmark in one's life and should be observed and considered.  And one can't help wondering if one is doing it right.  Anderson and his young actors get that spot on, doing insane things and analyzing them in an overly sane way.

The other thing is the 1960s.  Most filmmakers visiting the 1960s seem to believe that 1968-1973 was when the 60s took place.  Mad Men has corrected this impression to a great extent, and yet the tone is still off in many cases.  Few things evoke the 1960s so well as the battery-operated phonograph playing a 7" 33 RPM single from Europe, and the single is by a name forgotten to all but a few of us over 50, Francoise Hardy.  That is not an exercise in obscurity, but in precision.  Also, I can't help but be delighted to hear Leonard Bernstein's recording of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with narration read by young Henry Chapin (plus a snippet of Carnival of the Animals), a recording my son used regularly to fall asleep to during one early phase of his life.

[On the other hand, I have to admit to being embarrassed that, as a big fan of Benjamin Britten, I was unfamiliar with Noye's Fludde, the excerpts of which sounded wonderful.  Also, it looked great in the film.  Here's a picture of it on the right. I have resolved to hunt a recording of that work down.  Britten also provides the best underscoring cue in the film, a string pizzicato melody from the Simple Symphony, another piece unfamiliar to me.  Seriously, I know a lot of Britten's work very well, but he was quite prolific.]

Noyes Fludde reinforces the film's mythic and fable-like qualities.  To the critics who find this arch, I would direct them to Homer and the Bible and see if those aren't a little non-realistic as well.

Also assisting the period feeling of Moonrise, there's the color. At least in the print I saw, the film looked as though it had been shot in the 1960s on Ansco Color which had since gone a bit green.  Hard to say why, but it helped.

We didn't realize it 15 or 20 years ago, but what cinema needed was more Bob Balaban.  Glad to see Anderson doing his part to correct this problem, and made him omniscient, as is only right and proper.

Is this the first major commerical feature shot made entirely in Rhode Island?  Having summered in Maine throughout my childhood, I can't tell you how familiar and comfortable much of the film looked.  It is the cramped shabbiness preferred by members of the meritocracy.  (See also On Golden Pond.)

Here is a very nice video about Britten's opera I found at the website of Focus Films, distributor of Moonrise Kingdom.  It is quite engaging and I hope it makes up for this very dull post about a very lively movie, which you should see especially if you have ever been in love, or a child or outdoors in the rain.

Whiz-bang!

Luckily, Snowy is paying close attention.

Shouldn't it actually be titled SomeAdventures of Tintin (2011)?  That lies somewhat at the heart of the one problem Steven Spielberg's motion capture action adventure.  Namely, Tintin does not seem to have any animating principle in the story (wordplay only subconciously intentional).  Indy has to stop those Nazis from opening the Ark.  Marty McFly has to stop himself from disappearing.  Luke has to save the Princess.  But Tintin doesn't have anything he has to do.  Sure,  Captain Haddock has a big interest in the results of the adventure -- it's his legacy and his family honor. 

Not having been a fan of the comic books (I only encountered them in French language classrooms along with the Asterix books), I only caught that Tintin was some kind of a reporter about halfway through the movie.  He's a reporter without an editor, or, indeed any superior or any family.  He is the Pippi Longstocking of detectives -- a juvenile who neither has to worry about human ties nor the burden of earning money to live.  He can fail, I suppose, but he doesn't have anything to lose.  No stakes, no story.

Evidently this doesn't trouble his millions and millions of fans, and more power to them.  But for this viewer, it left the film with an empty core.  This should have made the film fast-moving and entertaining at the outset but dull and flagging as the story went on.  Such is Spielberg's skill  that it became more and more engrossing as complications and obstacles piled on top of each other in a Spielbergian way.  Moreover, Haddock assumed Tintin's place at the emotional center of the film as did, Snowy to a lesser degree.  (OK, I just like terriers.) But as the series continues (and it will) and Haddock becomes merely Tintin's companion and not the object of the story, who will take that emotional space?  A different character for each film?  Will that sustain over time?  The books have, for their audience, but I wonder if film works the same way.

The most interesting aspect of the design of the film stemming from the motion capture (which seems to have advanced substantially since Avatar) is the ability to stage a complete action scene -- I am thinking of a long chase late in the second act which, thanks to the animation technique is followed in a single, very long, preternaturally smooth shot.  The effect is comic, as Tintin strives to keep track of the thing he is pursuing, almost without regard to the vehicle he is riding, object he is swinging from, climbing over, etc., etc.  Such a thing could be done in live action, stringing separately shot pieces together digitally, but the resulting un-naturalness could be disturbing in a way that it is not in a clearly animated film, such as Tintin.

Thus, more interesting than the film itself, which is a reasonably enjoyable time-passer, is the question as to whether and how the series can sustain over a prolonged period of time, especially as Mr. Spielberg and producer/2nd unit director Peter Jackson withdraw from active participation.

Reluctant heroes

I don't have much to the add to the thousands of barrels of pixels which have been and will doubtless continue to be spilled about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010), so I will limit myself to a few probably very non-unique observations. (The rule of the blog is to write about every film I see.)

When I lived in Scotland in the mid-late 1970s, it was widely deplored that it was too difficult to make a feature film in the beautiful Scottish countryside because (a) the sky was often too dark for good images on a full-size screen and (b) the weather changed so rapidly that over the course of a shooting day it would be too hard to make shots within a single scene or sequence to match. It is my understanding that good chunks of HP7 was shot in Scotland, and those sequences too justice to the gloomy grandeur of the landscape. The problem is that so much digital manipulation is possible in post-production, it is impossible to know if the palette of green-grays that dominate the film are natural or man-made. Nonetheless, one must note that this is the greyest Harry Potter film made, which makes sense as Harry and friends have left Hogwarts to find and destroy the horcruxes (magic thingies that have to be destroyed--that's all you need to know).

This is the first of the series to penetrate Central London to any extent, and I am sorry the sequence is as short as it is. I can imagine all sorts of zany hijinks with Ron Weasley being introduced to the Muggles world, but the film doesn't have much time or space for comedy.

I understand that the film could not be expected to recap the previous films -- who would think of watching a film with "7" in the title without seeing the previous installments? -- but it would have been good to review the bidding and remind the audience what the stakes are, i.e. what exactly will happen if Voldemort succeeds. (I'm pretty sure things would be...bad.)

One of the benefits of splitting the book's story into two films is that there is time for scenes, for acting, for the characters to react to the events, rather than rushing from one situation to another. One of the appeals of the book series is that it is packed. Packed with incident, packed with details of this invented world and connections between the people and the incidents found there. Each book was at least a 7-layer cake of invention, which is rare in any kind of literature today, which so often feels attenuated, where the Potter series is robust.

The challenge for a filmmaker is to get all that story and texture in without making the film feel cramped. By spreading the story over five hours and two films, there is more air in the events, and for the first time (for me) I got the sense that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson in particular could actually act and not just speak lines with conviction, which is the reasonable minimum for childhood actors. And sending the characters across a barren landscape put them in a cinematic environment akin to that of a Western, a sci-fi film or a samurai film; those movie environments in which the characters must create or re-create society where there is none.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that, even though it feels lighter on the special effects than previous installments, HP7 feels more like a "movie-movie" than its predecessors. It's a welcome respite, as grim and dark as it is, before what is undoubtedly going to be a loud, operatic and effect-ridden finale this summer.

Central to the peculiar charm of the series, both book and film, is Harry Potter's reluctance and diffidence to the role of hero which history has thrust upon him. From the moment the he re-entered the wizarding world he was celebrated and feted -- which must have felt good -- for something he had done involuntarily -- not so good -- and for what he is bound to do in the future -- total bummer. To be made the future savior of your race is to live under the shadow of potential failure and disappointment your whole life.

That whole conundrum is neatly side-stepped by the hero (and I use the word advisedly) of When The Last Sword is Drawn (2003) a deliciously existential samurai epic which was inadequately distributed in this country, but which I urge you to seek out.

I must plead a shocking ignorance of the samurai genre, other than classics such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo (both remade as American Westerns). Both are directed by Kurosawa, who was criticized in Japan for being too Western in approach. Reversing the situation, it would be possible to develop an appreciation for the Western by seeing only Stagecoach and The Searchers, but one could not claim to be knowledgeable about the form, nor could one understand a great deal of the context. Genre gains both depth and texture by the accumulation of the prior examples of the genre. And great genres develop sub-genres within themselves, e.g., Westerns can be "sheriff cleaning up the town", "farmers vs. cattlemen", "cattle drive", "Indian fighting" and "good-bad man", "US Cavalry" and many many other variations. A film about recent Civil War veterans is going to be vastly different from, say a "closing of the west" film set at the turn of the 20th century, a generation and a half later. The same is evidently true of samurai films. Last Sword is an example of the Shinsengumi genre, about the samurai organized to defend the Shogun against the Emperor at the close of the Edo period.

But, although it is helpful to have some historical context, which one can pick up from a site such as Asian Media Wiki, like films of other genres, one can enjoy Lost Sword as pure film. And the pleasures are many and varied. There is some wonderful samurai action, both individual and in massed battle, and one of the most stunning special effects I've ever seen in the execution scene near the beginning of the film. There is a wonderful sense of design and color one would expect from a film which is an expression of Japanese culture. There are amusing and complex acting performances. But most of all there is the near-Brechtian character of Yoshimura, played brilliantly by Kiichi Nakai, an actor whose work I am going to seek out.

Yoshimura is like a talented Mother Courage, although possessed of a sense of honor which would be foreign to any Brecht character. Nonetheless, he has built his own value system parallel to that of the society around him, one in which loyalty to wife and children trumps that of the clan and the samurai code. Perversely, both values are extremely Japanese. An older Korean gentleman who was fluent in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese (he was of the generation in which all those languages were required of students) told me that he preferred to write and speak of family relationships in Japanese, because it had the greatest complexity and subtlety in that area.

Much to the consternation of the warrior culture of which he is part, Yoshimura puts his first priority on the survival of his family, and it makes him very modern, very Western and very Japaneses all at once. In Nakai's performance, Yoshimura is one of the most relatable figures in any Asian film, let alone a samurai film. He is like the early James Stewart, likely to be underestimated because he is humble, self-effacing and almost shy in comparison with the proud men around him, notwithstanding the fact that he may be the best swordsmen of them all.

Accordingly, with all the action and spectacle of the film, the highlight for me is pictured above, when Yoshimura has what turns out to be his final parting with his family, especially his tiny daughter, who bleats out "Papa" (in Japanese) as though she could have known what was happening to them. As a father, I can't be objective at all. Every parent knows the terror of the final parting with a child, and the existential terror of never knowing when that will be.

I know I haven't done much film analysis in this reflection. I'm afraid I found the film to affecting and emotional on first viewing to do so, but I do expect to revisit this movie, whether or not I write about it again.

The best thing is that you don't have to take my word for it. You can watch the entire film here. I envy you seeing it for the first time. (Allow 2-1/4 hours--it will be time well spent. Additional caveat -- there is some advertising.):

The Howard Hawks woman - eternal and constant

She appears in many films, played by many actresses, but as you can see here, there are certain verbal tropes that reappear over and over.



A fantasy figure, the "man's woman," sure, but it's a fantasy men and women can enjoy.

Grace under pressure

Leave it to the Germans to make a great Hemingway movie without Hemingway (which is the best way). It is best to get the spoiler out of the way-- North Face (2008) is about the failed effort to scale the north face of the Eiger (the Ogre) in Switzerland on the eve of the Second World War. The people of the time wanted to make this a nationalist phenomenon, but neither the protagonists nor the film are having any part of that claptrap. They want to climb because they want to climb; the film wants to follow them because that's what film wants to do.

Much has been made in the reviews of the authenticity of this film, and it certainly appears that way, but the special features on the DVD reveal just how extensively greenscreen and indoor sets were used ; most probably this is the only way such a brutally physically demanding story could have been told. The mountain has done away with more people than your average serial killer, and it would be inconceivable to work at the actual site, not least because it is always in shadow (hence the constant ice and snow). Nonetheless, almost none of the digital trickery is apparent on first viewing of the film--in fact, the film is too engrossing for the question of how it was accomplished to arise. Perhaps this marks a small moment in the maturity of digital effects--here is a film for which digital effects are a sine qua non, and yet they do not appear to be evident, so thoroughly convincing is the film. Nor would it be termed an "effects film" and yet they are more pervasive here than in many an action film.

Because it's never about the effects. It's about man versus mountain, and mountain wins decisively, but not without man giving a hell of a fight. Admittedly, the men look much the worse for wear, and if they had all survived, one harbors doubts about the quality of each of their lives thereafter. The point is, the film remains gripping and convincing in a way literally impossible just a few years ago. I wonder if we will become more sophisticated about such things, and in time the CGI in this film will look as fake as cheesy rear-projection from the 1940s looks to us now. Better not to wait to find out and appreciate these films now.