Random Videos I Just Wanted to Share

I decided to post a few videos that I found interesting lately.  There's no real reason for these, and no thematic connection, I just felt like sharing them.


This is the greatest fake trailer I have ever seen, and it's just gone viral, so it's probably showing up all over right now.



This is the most beautiful and realistic piece of computer generated imaging that I have seen. Watch it full-screen all the way through.  If you follow the link, there's a couple making-of videos and explanations of how it works.
From the author's description:  A Full-CG Animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of vie where main subjects are already-built spaces.  Sometimes in an abstract way.  Sometimes surreal.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.


This video goes along with the video I posted in my Social Network review, another "kinetic typography" of a key scene.



Now here's a couple videos made on Xtranormal, a site where you can write a script and have pre-designed digital characters act it out.  Several of these videos have become pretty popular, most following this general template:  One ignorant character asks another about his/her job and the latter becomes increasingly irritated by the idiocy of the former, in a parody of common conversations people with these jobs have to go through.  They were even written up in The Wall Street Journal!






And finally, this is what's happening outside my window right now:

Unfinished Critique of Black Swan

Note: Review is unpolished, partially formed, just posted because I wanted to have something up about this movie.

It’s over the top but that’s not the reason I have a problem.  More that it seems all surface and no real depth.

Movie combines Aronofsky’s styles from last several films, some calling it his stylistic apotheosis.  I like the style, though it has its downside.  Combines handheld behind the head following, spinning, lots of  steadicam, with surrealist imagery and story, makes reality and  illusion hard to distinguish--but not that hard.  Some people act as if impossible to know what’s going on, but I thought it was fairly straightforward.  Color scheme  emphasizes black-white-gray, striking but rather repetitive and not  particularly subtle or beautiful.  That is one way its very different from The Red Shoes, its not about beauty.  Not really about art, more about quest for perfection and self- mutilation in pursuit of ones goal. About how perfectionism can be destructive and psychologically damaging in any creative activity or sport.  I prefer to see story as one of Nina psyching herself up Method-style for her role as the Black Swan, rather than just a tale of a crazy girl getting crazier.  After Cassel tells her what she needs to do to get the part, she starts consciously and subconsciously attempting to unleash her inner black swan, though her success here ends up driving her over the edge.  She becomes the role so completely that she destroys her own psyche in the process.  There is never any real question that the things she sees are hallucinations.  The only things which are questionable are the sex scene and the apparent killing at the end.  Obviously she isn’t actually turning into a swan.

The lack of depth referred to is that few of these symbols have any complexity to them, or even much ambiguity.  There are not dark secrets in Ninas past to reveal, or new depths to her motivations that become apparent.  Everything is text in this movie-- there isn’t any subtext.  Many of the thrills are just gotcha scares, though I think they work well for what they are.  The Tchaikovsky-comboscore is intense and occasionally too loud--but this is all just identifying it as an intense psychological thriller, and less of a slow-burn tension building piece.  I don’t think one of these is categorically better than the other, so I don’t think it a crime that the movie moves so fast and so loud.  But I do see it as in many ways a companion piece to Pi, and its rather disappointing to see how little Aronofsky has advanced in intellectual depth since then. Pi was quite good for a first film, filed with distressing images, tight pacing, and a high concept intelligent premise.  But as a philosophical inquiry it had little to offer.  Its math was supposedly complex and exciting, but It had to be kept simple enough for general audiences so it never got beyond a few basic concepts.  Michael Crichton novels have involved far more complex mathematical discussions.  Overall, the movie wished to suggest great intellectual depth without actually going so deep as to be hard to follow.  It was enjoyable on a visceral and movie-movie level, but intellectually it was hollow:  Black Swan essentially does the same thing.

The constant sexual tension gets ugly and uncomfortable.  Trying for Cronenburg?  I feel to punish audience with such explicitness ought to have reason.  Sex not moralized, psychologized, realistic, or justified by nuance and delicacy, just for the thrill and titillation.  Leering, prurient interest.  Lesbian scene just there for inherent eroticism.  Whole film seems to be leering.

Natalie Portman’s performance has been acclaimed up the wazoo but I have a few qualms.  She obviously dedicated herself to this part to an extraordinary degree, training as a ballerina for hours everyday for close to a year.  But while this lets her look the part, she is still protected by editing and doubles to make her dancing perfect, and being able to do the steps does not a great performance make.  Through the course of the whole movie, she seems to maintain one facial expression--red-eyed, lip trembling on the verge of a sob--which could be expected in the real world to elicit constant expressions of concern from all those around her.  She is told a couple times that she needs to relax, but her obvious instability should keep her from being chosen for any part, let alone the main one.  The audience--or I at least-- quickly grow tired of this expression, wanting to shake her and tell her to either snap out of it or go home and sleep.  She only breaks this expression a couple times over the course of the film, and the effect is electric: when she gets the part and goes to the bathroom to call her mother with tears of happiness, and when she dances the Black Swan at the end.  Her performance when calling her mother is note perfect, and an obvious Oscar clip.  It is the climax, though, when the movie redeems itself and her performance finally opens up. When she finally takes charge and marches across the stage, fury and danger in every movement, the release is palpable.  The camera follows her out onto the stage gliding and swirling as she does, looking out at the crowd one moment and back at her face the  next.  This subjective camera is the climax of the films style just as it is the climax of the plot and of Nina;s character.  Here the pure virtuosity of the style makes up for any lack of depth in the story, any lack of complexity to the characters.  In the face of that orgasmic, joyful, terrifying finale, all my objections fall away.  That was a great ending.  In fact, it was perfect.

Two Recent Movies: The King's Speech, 127 Hours

The King's Speech is the kind of bland, innocuous dram that's easy to like while watching it and easy to forget in two days.  In the story of King George VI who must overcome his severe stammer in order to give a speech to rally Britain for World War II, everything just happens exactly the way you'd expect it to.  It hits all the story beats movies like this always hit--the teacher and student who initially don't get along but learn to become friends, the odd training techniques, the point where the student almost gives up, the point where the teacher is revealed to be not exactly who the student thought him to be and accusations fly, the final triumph in the end which is not just successful on a public level but also personally, etc.--only this time, instead of being a movie about, say, an elementary school spelling bee it's about the fate of the free world.  The film doesn't really focus on the fate of the free world that much, though, and the political machinations in the run-up to war are skated over pretty quickly (unlike in The Queen, which gained much of its value from the inside-look at politics under Tony Blair).  I would imagine that the actual political infighting between the king and his ministers would be a good deal more exciting than this, and I'm sure the abdication crisis was a much bigger deal even than presented here, with a great deal more family strife, but this isn't apparent in a movie focusing on taming a stammer.  Actually, this is probably a good thing, for the supporting cast that plays Churchill, Chamberlain, and the Archbishop is pretty dreadful.  Guy Pearce as Edward the Abdicator is pretty good, but he isn't given much to do.  Fortunately, the three central characters of George VI, the Queen, and elocution teacher Lionel Logue are all played remarkably well by Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, and Geoffrey Rush respectively.  Actually, Carter doesn't have all that much to do either, but she does it perfectly, so no complaints.  The film rests, then, entirely on the relationship of the two men, the soon-to-be king and his tutor, and this works pretty well, it must be said.  Rush is wonderful as the witty, eccentric Logue who still nurses dreams of acting Shakespeare on the stage, and Firth is emotional and empathetic as a man whose disability leaves him feeling inferior and frustrated and embarrassed nearly constantly.  Their eventual friendship is warm and believable, and it would take a true cynic not to feel for both men.  There is also a rich vein of humor which flows through the film which helps to keep things from getting too sappy, and certainly not boring.

Director Tom Hooper deserves credit for getting these performances and managing the tone pretty successfully, but he also has the annoying tic of framing everything in the most awkwardly artsy manners possible.  He keeps shooting people straight on using wide lenses against strangely colored walls, suggesting a blander Wes Anderson, or shoving people way over into the corner of frames, while filling up the rest of the frames with, again, strangely colored walls.  I guess he was trying to avoid the British cinema-of-quality look, but it just comes off sort of awkward and forced, not adding anything.

Rating: 7/10 stars. (I almost gave it a 6, but what the heck, I'm feeling generous.)

127 Hours
I have not seen all of Danny Boyle's output to this point--in particular I am missing his acclaimed 28 Days Later.  But from what I have seen, he is an always-interesting, always-exciting director who has yet to make a truly great film, and perhaps never will.  His movies are shot with relentless stylistic excess--a constantly moving camera, wild angles, fast cutting, and lots of pop music.  They feel like music videos, but they lack the ambience and feeling of someone like Wong Kar-Wai, whose films also feel like music videos, but with brilliance in every frame.  Instead, Boyle's movies are relentlessly kinetic and always watchable, but thematically murky and no more thoughtful than the average Hollywood drama.  This inescapable style of his means he probably wasn't the best choice to helm the tense, claustrophobic story of a man stuck in a crevasse in the desert for five days.

From the beginning, Boyle fills the screen with flashy, quick moving images.  He splits the screen, uses time lapse photography, aerial zoom-in shots, etc.  This is fine as far as it goes, but it feels like this is a movie about the Tour de France rather than a tight, life-or-death struggle.  This style will not let up for more than a few seconds for the rest of the film, and it takes away a lot of the tension and all of the claustrophobia of the ensuing events. Fortunately, the ensuing events are so horrifying and fascinating that the audience remains rapt. James Franco plays Aron Ralston, an adventurous rock-climber type who dislodges a boulder while clambering through a ravine and suddenly finds himself stuck, with little food and water and no rescue coming.  Eventually, he has to cut his arm off to free himself.  Franco is excellent here, giving essentially a one-man performance for much of the film that never comes close to feeling boring or repetitive.  Of course, this is partly because Boyle's camera can't sit still and there are so many dream/memory/hallucination sequences that take us out of the hole, but Franco still deserves credit.  And despite the fact that Boyle denies us ever sharing the feeling of being stuck along with Franco, and shows pretty much all his escape attempts in fast forward so we don't become bored (not that we were going to), he still does at least three scenes right that save the movie.

First, when Ralston first dislodges the boulder and traps himself, the music falls away and we are suddenly forced to share his shock and growing fear as he realizes his arm is wedged immovably.  The oddness of the moment is allowed to speak for itself, as Ralston is standing on the ground, the rest of his body fine, with only his arm caught by the rock.  He should be able to just walk away, but he can't, and we his growing terror is horrifying.  Second, Boyle gives us a scene in the center of the film that shows Ralston talking into his camcorder and recording what are likely to be his last thoughts on earth (something the real Ralston also did).  Franco interrogates himself about his own stupidity, mocking his own faults and failures, while a sitcom laugh-track plays, before finally breaking down and telling his family how much he loves them and will miss them.  The scene is powerful and emotional, and Boyle's split-screen effects and shifting back and forth between camera stocks for once work perfectly to serve the story.  And finally, Boyle gets the amputation scene right.  It is without doubt one of the most painful things to watch onscreen that I have ever seen, and it is a much more difficult process than I ever imagined.  But it is also cathartic, and when it is finally finished, and Ralston stands suddenly, incongruously free of the boulder where he has been stuck all this time, it is a beautiful moment.  Of course, then he has to walk several miles to find help, but that is handled well, too, and the whole climactic sequence left me feeling hopeful and alive.

Rating: 7/10 stars

Red Riding Trilogy

The Red Riding Trilogy consists of three made-for-TV movies produced in 2009 by the BBC, entitled Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980, and Red Riding: 1983.  Directed by talented feature film directors and starring quite a cast of experienced British actors, they were so highly acclaimed in the UK that they were given theatrical releases in Europe and America in 2010.  They were hyped quite a bit here at the beginning of the year, but they seem to have been mostly forgotten by end-of-year list-makers.  They are well worth seeking out, however, as a dense, disturbing trilogy of British neo-noirs, with atmosphere that will seep into you brain and stay there.


The films are based on a series of novels by David Peace.  (There are actually four novels, but Nineteen-Seventy-Seven wasn't filmed.)  The books are reportedly even more dark, brutal, and despairing than the films, and that's saying something.  The plot centers on corruption in the West Riding, Yorkshire, police department, as the community is haunted by at least two different serial killers who go uncaught for several years.  The stories are inspired by the real place, and certain actual events including the Yorkshire Ripper murders and documented police cover-ups from the era.  The movies take some major liberties with history, however, depicting a police force as corrupt and evil as any on earth, bearing more resemblance to the KGB or the Mafia than actual British coppers.  The main conspirators repeatedly lift their glasses in a toast, saying, "To the North, where we do what we want!"  The corruption eventually becomes so all-consuming that it becomes unbelievable, at lest for this viewer, though it's depicted so powerfully that it's ultimately forgivable.  And the British critics, apparently, did not find it difficult to believe.  The depiction of Yorkshire in the '70s and '80s, apart from a few of the dirtier details, is apparently highly accurate, and it's fairly horrifying.  The quirky pastoral hamlets of James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small novels this ain't.


The first film (directed by Julian Jarrold) includes the biggest star-making turn of the trilogy, with Andrew Garfield as a young reporter who thinks he's a hotshot but is sadly mistaken.  He's out to discover the story behind the disappearances/murders of several young children in the area, including the body of a young girl found with swan wings stitched into her back.  A classic noir hero at 20 instead of the more traditional 40, he drinks hard, chain smokes, and looks at the world with the cynicism of a big city reporter.  Unfortunately, that cynicism turns out to be dramatically optimistic, and his belief in justice is tragically naive.  He wanders the tribalist, poverty stricken and rotten world of Yorkshire, mouthing off to authority figures and getting beaten up repeatedly, like Philip Marlowe in bellbottoms and leather jacket. And his fatal weakness is, as always, a woman; in this case, the mother of one the murdered girls.  Unfortunately, this woman (played by Rebecca Hall) is terribly under-written, and while they tumble into bed several times, their attraction never makes much sense.  Her actions and motivations, even after the end, are always clouded and never more than guessed at leaving her nothing but plot figure and not a real character.  This is one of the flaws of the series as a whole, that many characters feel under-written and they lack the depth we want need to maintain interest.  Instead, the trilogy focuses on atmosphere and labyrinthine plot maneuvers, which it happily does very well.

1980 (directed by James Marsh of Man on Wire) is also an accomplished film, dealing with the actual Yorkshire Ripper and starring Paddy Considine as a cop investigating other cops.  The police force has really been trying to find the Ripper, but they also wish to blame him for other murders which do not fit his MO, and they avoid following up sources which may take them toward their own deep-seated corruption.  Considine tries to get to the bottom of this while also managing his marriage and a dormant affair with his female partner.  This film, though, is more low-key than the others--though perhaps more believable--and it's rather forgettable compared to the first and last segments.  It furthers the plot and provides lots of important details, but as a movie it offers few thrills or answers.

The final segment, 1983, is where things really shine, though, unravelling all the plot threads and making the entire picture coherent at last.  It becomes evident that all three films need to be watched together, either right in a row, or on consecutive nights.  This is not immediately obvious because the characters followed are almost completely different over the first two films, and the plot seems to be only tangentially related, but this is a mirage.  There is no point in watching one without the others, because they are incoherent alone.  They do not hold up well as stand-alone movies in any case, not only because the plot plays out over all three, but because characters take on more depth and actions new meaning as new events occur, and they are structured to avoid a real pay-off until the finale. The final film itself is mostly a re-evaluation of all that went before which brings certain characters always lurking in the backgrounds to the fore--especially the mysterious cop played by Paul Morrissey--and it's awkwardly structured as a story.  There is at least one major dropped thread, a romance that starts between Morrissey's cop and a fortune teller-lady which disappears entirely, and is left unresolved, but there are probably several others that are less noticeable.  Nevertheless, the final sequence of the film is incredibly beautiful and powerful, and makes up for all the mistakes.  Everything comes together in the blast of a gun, white feathers blowing in the wind, and a young man wading in the surf and starting to smile.


Overall, the trilogy's strongest trait is its atmosphere, always dank and dirty-looking, with hidden depths to every shadow.  This is not to say the films look alike, however, for they are each shot by different directors and cameramen, and on different film stock to boot.  The films change as the eras change, the first film mostly an ugly '70s green, the second full of black shadows, while the third reflects a more prosperous 1980s with clearer brighter blues and real sunlight instead of clouds.  I was nevertheless rather irritated by the editing.  There was far too much of it, especially in the 1974.  Shots were never allowed to breathe, everything had to be chopped up into tight, moving close-ups. The whole trilogy could have benefitted from more restrained composition; step back and let foreboding fill up the silences.  As good as it is, these films also made me appreciate David Fincher's Zodiac even more.  He tells a very similar story there (hunt for a serial killer at large in the '70s), but he manages to give us an enormous amount of details and incident in less than 3 hours, keeps everything coherent, and frames every shot to perfection.  Red Riding is a worthy trilogy, but it clearly lives in Zodiac's shadow.

                    

(As a post script, I should note the excellent performances of Sean Bean, Sean Harris, Peter Mullan, and Robert Sheehan, who each create powerfully memorable characters despite limitations.  They, along with Garfield and Morrissey, make by far the biggest impressions out of the massive cast.)


Rating:  8/10 Stars.

Quick Thoughts on A Charlie Brown Christmas

I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV last week, as millions of people have done for 55 years now. Immediately afterward, on the same channel, a new animated short premiered which its creators were obviously hyping to become a new holiday classic. It was called: Prep & Landing: Operation Secret Santa.

The contrast could not have been more dramatic. While Charlie Brown was a low-budget hand-drawn animated film from the 60s, Prep & Landing was a brand-new computer animated short that flashed all its no doubt millions of dollars in production costs in our face for its 10 minutes of running time. Charlie Brown had often seemed flawed to me before: its animation is so obviously quickly and cheaply done, with no depth or detail to the images and everyone moving from left to right. The dancing scenes are just made up of a bunch of repetitive little movements, obviously done on the cheap. The jokes are all simple and a bit awkward, without the usual rapid-fire delivery of modern cartoon gags. What could possibly be so special about a Christmas Special so flawed?

Everything.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is special for exactly the reasons it looks so quaint next to Prep & Landing and others of its ilk. It is the antidote to the modern selfishness and materialism present in so much of the media at this time of year. Sure, things like Prep & Landing throw in a little moral at the end--Santa gets a sentimental gift from Mrs. Claus--but those morals are so obviously fake, underhanded, and unearned. They do not reflect the fact that these specials are made entirely for commercial reasons, and cater to our every contemporary whim, attempting to thrill us with bright colors and pop culture mash-ups. Because it embodies its message in itself, Charlie Brown Christmas avoids all that. Oh, I'm sure people make money off it every year, but who really cares about that? The film itself is what matters, and the motives on display there are entirely commendable. The Peanuts gang are voiced by actual children, many of whom obviously have no idea to act. Their comic timing may be off, but their sincerity shines through. The low key humor is human and compassionate, tragic and beautiful, in a way no manufactured Prep & Landing--or any normal cartoon, for that matter--ever is. When Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas--the birth of Christ--it is a rebellion against modern materialistic amnesia, an act of cultural recovery, and a proclamation of the Gospel on the most soul-sucking of all popular opiates: television. It may not be grand or complex, but it is important, and its purity of purpose is visible in every off-beat dance move and behind-the-beat punch-line its characters make.

Lots of TV Christmas specials claim to rail against commercialism and deliver the true meaning of Christmas; only one actually does it.

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Where was the audience when this movie came out in August? For some reason, people stayed away from it in droves, thereby missing out on one of the most hilarious, creative, and original movie in years. There has never been anything quite like it in the world of film, and for that reason alone it would be worth seeing.

Scott Pilgrim is a young college graduate living in Toronto with a roommate, trying not to think what he ought to do with his life. He starts the movie dating a high school girl named Knives Chau, but soon loses his heart to the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers, an exotic beauty from New York. Problems ensue. Namely, Scott has to attempt to juggle two girls, while Ramona’s Seven Evil Exes attempt to kill him at every opportunity, obliging him to engage in numerous video-game-style battles to the death (death in this movie consists of popping out of existence, leaving a pile of coins in one’s wake). If that sounds complicated, it is, but it doesn’t feel that way while watching the movie. Events whip by so fast your head might spin, but you will certainly never be bored.

The comedy in this movie comes from everywhere (the characters, the situation, the environment, the story), in every form (verbal wit, slapstick physicality, general goofiness), using every trick in a director’s book (musical cues, special effects, sound effects, cinematography, and editing). This bewildering barrage of humor might be unprecedented if it did not come from Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. His style was apparent from the first film, and he has only broadened and honed it since. It is worth noting that over half the gags come straight from the sources comics by Brian Lee O’Malley, but their transference into film is still remarkable and unique. Many effects have never been seen in a live-action film before, though quite a few will be familiar to fans of Japanese anime, and various Asian B-movies. Wright manages to appropriate techniques from video games, comic books, music videos, and animation, without every making us feel we are not watching a movie. This is experimental cinema masquerading as mainstream blockbuster.

Scott’s world consists entirely of teenagers and 20-somethings--no older or younger people exist. This makes the film’s scope limited perhaps (and probably limits its audience--I doubt many people over 40 would be interested), but then Wright and O’Malley are not trying to distill all life, just embody a certain brief period in the lives of the Millennial generation. This they do extremely well. Unlike The Social Network, though, which attempts to analyze its era in depth, Scott Pilgrim exemplifies life in the 21^st century by playing with our collective fantasies and entertainments, swirling it all up in a colorful mix easily digestible to our miniscule attention spans. First, they get the culture right. The old John Hughes eighties rules of cheerleaders, jocks, math geeks, and screw-ups no longer apply. Scott Pilgrim’s world is populated by gamers, geeks, jocks, hipsters, slackers, indie rockers, celebrities, and Asians. If the story took place in an American city, there would no doubt be more minority representation, but this is Toronto. (An example of the new melting pot: Knives comes from an immigrant Chinese family, but goes to a Catholic high school.) Scott himself embodies several of these categories--he is a gamer, a geek, and a mild rocker--but he is mostly a slacker. The story is not a celebration of this slacking, though, but a call to resist it, put it behind one, and grow up. Scott’s growth is clear over the course of the film: he must learn to take responsibility for his actions, become proactive instead of passive, and put others before himself. Cera plays the part deftly, alternating from dumb to sweet to heroic with ease. He has taken criticism for always playing the same character, but with his last couple movies he is proving these critics wrong by expanding his range in several directions.

The weak point in the movie may be its female characters. They are everywhere, but most get little screen time, and we never really understand them, especially Ramona’s inexplicable attraction to Scott. This is not the fault of the actors involved--every single one of them is perfect, and I wish I could single all of them out for individual praise. The graphic novels, of which there are six, allow much more time for the relationship to develop and have scenes which focus on characters other than Scott. If you felt a little lost in the story or just wanted more of it all, I highly recommend the comics. They give needed back story and definitely added to my appreciation of the movie. In the end, though, I think I prefer the movie. It really does a fantastic job of packing everything in the comics into 112 minutes--the entire first book is in there mostly word-for-word--and the jokes are often funnier onscreen than on the page--adding color and sound helps a lot. As for character development: We see everything from Scott’s perspective, and he doesn’t understand the girls around him at all, so how are we supposed to understand them? He spends most of the movie being remarkably selfish--his journey is about learning to appreciate others as separate individuals in their own right. I think the movie accomplishes that.

With this film, Edgar Wright has surpassed previous genre parodists like Mel Brooks, and become a true auteur of the cinema. It was always obvious that his movies were better than the average Scary Movie clone, but now it is clear that his only peers among current directors are Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. The older generation might never get him, but I think his works will become classics to be watched for years to come.

Another good review which says most of what I just did better can be found here. And lots of other great reviews and perceptive comments can be found here.

Rating: 10/10 Stars