Found footage losing its way

Actor moves hand, stagehands crush car.  Movie magic!

One might analogize the "found footage" genre in film to the use of Pirandellian effects in theater.  Pirandello was a writer obsessed with the dividing line between artifice and reality, and who liked to use the immediacy of theater to blur the line between the agreed-upon artifice and the uncontrollable aspect of live performance to create a confusion within the audience.  Scenes appear to be spontaneously created or interrupted by the actors or by the characters.  The form is lent an air of verisimilitude and should (if it is working properly) reduce the sensation that the creators are manipulating the story for their own convenience.

But like any convention, you have to set rules and stick to them.  And that's where Chronicle (2012) goes a bit off the rails.  In Cloverfield, for example, the creators are fairly scrupulous about adhering to the geography of the camera's travels and makes ingenious use of the idea that camcorders can over previous recordings in order, which can survive in snippets in order to simulate flashbacks.  (Digital media, by the way, destroy that narrative device, since data is simply wiped without prior artifacts surviving.)

Chronicle sets up the convention that different people can pick up the camera, or even that there are multiple cameras.  But there are a number of shots (I'm thinking especially of the party sequence) in which the camera perspective is completely unexplained and unidentified.  It just was too inconvenient to stick to the rules, so the filmmakers cheat and start presenting third-person points of view -- a complete violation of the genre, and a confession of a lack of faith in the format.

Which goes to the heart of the problem with Chronicle -- the story has no reason to be told in the found footage format, except that is all the rage with the youngsters, most recently in the atrocious Paranormal Activity franchise.  (One notes that something called Chernobyl Diaries didn't even open this year, but sank like a stone within hours of beginning its run.)  The problem is compounded when the more complex effects shots begin, because they start looking slicker and slicker (presumably there wasn't time and money to make them look as fuzzy and funky as they should have) and weaken the illusion that we are looking at home video.

Then the film completely collapses its own premise in the final 20 minutes, when it turns into a garden-variety telekenesis destructo-fest, with transparently effect-y effects going on and on and we are stuck with three repellant characters competing to see who can be least repellant, although no actual heroism or courage is ever displayed.

It's a shame, because the first hour of the film addressed some really interesting moral and ethical issues raised by the entire superhero genre; specifically, how should superpowers be used?  What if we're not as good and pure as Superman, or as driven as Batman?  What if a superhero was just a regular person before (Peter Parker, anyone?)  How do you establish the rules about when to use your powers and when to refrain?  How do you define "using your powers only for good?"  Especially when the powers are in the hands of teenagers, whose heads are filled with a roiling stew of impulses, hormones, idealism, half-digested cynicism, media influences and family history?  That could have been a fine film, but the makers of Chronicle seem to have become intimidated by the Pandora's Box they opened up and reverted to genre slam-bam.

Too bad.

Meander is not just a river in Turkey

Co-writer director Terry Gilliam, when asked about the genesis of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) said something to the effect of "I wasn't really thinking about telling a story." In that goal--not telling a story--Gilliam succeeded admirably. (The comment was made during a Q&A sponsored by Creative Screenwriting Magazine, which can be heard here. It's a great podcast series, incidentally, which you really should check out for yourself.)

It's natural enough for Gilliam, a visual artist by training, to begin with images; but eventually there needs to be something else; if not narrative, character, if not narrative or character, a clear thematic or philosophic center. But something, please something, more than a whole lot of pretty pictures. Gilliam does seem to be saying something about making choices between sort-of evil and sort-of good, and there is a severely anemic conflict between a sort-of devil and a sort-of Prospero-type wizard. But Gilliam makes movies like an old man telling a complicated story, wandering down numberless dead ends and then saying, "What was I talking about?" and doing it so frequently that none of us can remember what he was talking about.

I am prejudiced toward Gilliam: Monty Python's emergence in the US was a central part of my college cultural experience. And Gilliam nobly upheld the group ethic to defy, or rather to eschew, logic, explanations and anything that resembled a point. But Python was stringing together brief segments into a 30-minute entertainment. This is no way to approach a full-length work that is meant to have some resonance for the audience.

Gilliam has always worked better with collaborators with complementary talents--Tom Stoppard for Brazil, Richard LaGravenese for Fisher King (the latter project also having been initiated and produced by a very disciplined team, Debra Hill and Linda Obst) . Left alone with pets and pals like Charles McKeown (who co-authored Baron Munchausen--didn't anyone see disaster looming again?) Gilliam feels free to dally and ramble among fantastic visual elements and effects, leaving the audience behind. We are engaged with no character, nothing is at stake, nothing much happens.

There is a widespread notion that the forced re-casting of the central role after Heath Ledger's premature death, by which the part is now shared with Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, saved the film. If by "saved" you mean "made more incomprehensible," then yes, the film was saved. At least when Bunuel double-cast a role in That Obscure Object of Desire he was deliberately setting out to confuse and annoy the audience. Here, that's just an added bonus.

Also, will somebody tell me when Christopher Plummer became the go-to old guy for animation, fantasy and generally weird film projects? The problem with Plummer is that he does have a wonderfully fruity voice and a highbridged nose, but not much more than that. When Gilliam cast Ralph Richardson as God in Time Bandits, you had a wonderful character--the fussy old London-club-armchair Colonel Blimp type that could really run a universe. Plummer's performance in Imaginarium suggests that God (or goodness or poetry or whatever his character is meant to represent) is nothing but a ham actor, all paint and feathers and fancy verse. No real competition with Tom Waits's more focused and charismatic Mr. Nick.

With a solid script and a firm production hand, Gilliam is a strong individual voice in film, an important if secondary director. But no director, even the visually decorative ones such as Vincent Minnelli or Tim Burton, can make the pantheon without a real commitment and adherence to character and narrative.

After effects

Peter Jackson, who made Heavenly Creatures, a brilliant descent into literal madness of two adolescent girl, seems to be trying the same thing in The Lovely Bones (2009), which apparently stands for the proposition that when you die, you will go to a fever dream version of New Zealand. The afterlife is, evidently, the ultimate special effect.

My wife, who read the novel, feared that the film version would focus on the crime-detection aspects of the story and get bogged down in the material circumstances of the story. That's not where the film went wrong. The story elements are actually rather dull and routine, and ultimately don't amount to anything.

So the film's entire raison d'etre is its concept of the world beyond. The story adheres to the old concept (it's prominent in Our Town and the Peter Beagle novel A Fine and Private Place) that the dead gradually lose interest in the affairs of the living, perhaps once the circumstances of their death are understood or their loved ones have learned how to properly mourn and/or move on. Sometimes its posited that they have a particular task to perform or message to pass on to the living, as in Heart and Souls or Field of Dreams.

There's two problems with all this. First of all, once you've introduced some CGI, everything looks as though it might be digitally created. This is a particularly acute problem for Mr. Jackson, whose Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners and King Kong all look as though they take place on some other version of the earth. (Maybe it's just the way New Zealand always looks.) I suppose it made him the ideal director for the Ring films. But the story comes completely ungrounded, when even the suburb neighborhood in which it begins could have been faked. (And certainly the landscape in which Stanley Tucci's villain meets his end is digitally created.)

The bigger problem, the one that all artists in this vein of storytelling share, is that Death is that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler has yet returned. (I heard that somewhere, I'm pretty sure.) Anyone who contemplates the specifics of a life other than this one is guessing. Even the Bible is vague on the particulars. And Mr. Jackson posits a child's cotton-candy Rainbow Brite eternity, which I hope is meant to reflect the very young protagonist's view of the world to come, and not Mr. Jackson's own imaginings. Let's be fair: it's an impossible subject, and that Peter Jackson stubs his toe on it is not his fault except to the extent that he tried to do it all.

I'm afraid the movie suggests that when you die, your soul goes to Wellington, New Zealand, where you will dwell in Weta Digital forever.

Because they can

2012 (2009) is to filmmaking what Demolition Derby is to actual auto racing. It's just a lot of stuff blowing up and falling down and it's a lot of fun and it doesn't improve your mind or your soul or teach you anything about anything, no not one little bit.

It's common to trace disaster porn back to The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and the disaster films that trailed it in the 1970s. But really the impulse goes back farther, at least to the early 50s, when we were being regularly attacked by Martians in walking cylinders or grouchy awakened dinosaurs or giant ants or indefinable blobs. Whether it was the end of World War II or the beginning of the Cold War, but we sensed pretty well that the jig was up, and that security was purely an illusion. And back then, if the producers could have convincing blown up the whole world, they would have done it. (They did so, albeit offscreen in Kiss Me Deadly and Dr. Strangelove).

But now we can really show it--at least well enough to convince our 2009-10 eyes, although who knows how primitive and hokey this film will look in 10 years. (One of my problems with both African Queen and The Birds is that their unconvincing effects made the entire premises of the films hard to swallow).

There was a lot of talk when the film was released last fall that it had something to do with Mayan predictions of disaster, and there was a lot of talk about what we're doing wrong. But this isn't one of those If Only We Had Listened To The Scientists In Time movies. The whole reason the Earth is imploding is tossed off in a couple of minutes and doesn't seem to be important to anyone except one schmuck Indian scientist who gets wiped out in a tsunami. So there.

The final proof that the film is after nothing but cheap thrills is the heavy reliance on wellworn story tropes. Seriously--a character says, "There's something coming between us" and a giant chasm opens up between them. As they say on SNL, "Really?" In fact this page at TV tropes.org lists literally dozens of hackneyed story tropes that 2012 employs with downright glee and complete contempt for concepts of originality and insight into the human condition.

In the words of Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, "They blowed up real good."

Lies like truth

The name of this blog comes from a remark attributed to Jean-Luc Godard that film is "truth twenty-four times per second." With digital technology, this is becoming less and less true. We think we are sensitized to the presence of effect shots, but how many of the scenes in this demo reel would you have identified as an effect? I mean really--Ugly Betty crashing into a bus shelter? This development, as wonderful as it is for the budgets and the aesthetic expressiveness of film (and filmed television), is starting to throw one of its basic premises--its basis in perceptible physical reality--into doubt. Or does it? What do you think?

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