[via thesetoday from many days ago] Interview with Guillermo del Toro as Hellboy II is just around the corner.
And he has retained a highly contagious passion for every aspect of filmmaking. He refuses to start using a 2nd unit camera team, preferring to oversee every shot with trusty cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who has shot all of his movies.
On projects he hopes to shoot in the future:
And if you’re very lucky he’ll show you his constant companion, a dog-eared notebook stuffed with intricate sketches of past, present and future films. Highlights include demon drawings from Mephisto’s Bridge (a 15-year-old del Toro script about a Faustian doppleganger) recycled into Hellboy II; and concept art for dream projects like satanic Sherlock Holmes mystery The List of 7 and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains Of Madness, about the discovery of a lost civilisation in Antarctica.
Pages from his scrapbook related to Hellboy II are online.
On the connection between his childhood and his choice of material:
I saw my first corpse at four, I worked next door to a morgue as a teenager, I’ve had guns put to my head and seen people killed in front of me. That’s why I turned down directing Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban and The Chronicles Of Narnia – I don’t understand youth because I’ve never had one.
Hellboy II closes the LA Film Festival tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to it as he's a consummate visual stylist.
It's taken me many days after seeing Wanted at last week's opening night gala at the LA Film Festival to jot down my thoughts here, and that probably says enough. It wasn't fun enough to spur me to rave about it immediately, but to pick on Timur Bekmambetov's latest movie for thin to little character development or logic seems as insightful as grousing over the poor gas mileage in a Hummer. But still...
I saw Night Watch at the Tribeca Film Festival a couple years back, and I entered that movie and left that movie feeling the same things I felt going into and coming out of Wanted:
Going in: "Ooh, that looks like fun!"
Coming out: "Ehh."
Bekmambetov's specialty might be termed visual rococo. What might be simple and direct becomes, in Bekmambetov's hands, overelaborate and extravagant. There's a place for a director like that in this ever-escalating war for the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. In a movie about assassins, for example, it's not enough to have men in trenchcoats flying in slow motion across the screen, a handgun blazing in each hand, doves soaring out towards the sky like refugees from a magician's dressing room. John Woo has covered that ground, and then some.
Fanboys are always looking for new visual excess in their summer fare, and Bekmambetov and the screenwriters pull out a few new tricks. Bullets curve as shooters whip their guns with a lateral motion, almost like tennis rackets or frisbees, as they fire. Not one kill occurs in real time. The frame rate ramps from molasses-like slow motion to hyper speed, and back again, all the better to showcase bullets tearing through flesh and exploding fireworks of blood.
There's no doubting his visual ambition, but if only someone could bridle it towards the service of directed storytelling. I'd like to spoil the story for you, but that would imply that one existed. If the premise is tough to swallow even when explained in the arresting baritone of Morgan Freeman, that's a sign not to try. I'll only note that it involves binary code and weaving and an ancient league of assassins called The Fraternity and...oh, forget it. Did you know Angelina Jolie rises out of a hot tub in the nude? Not animated Angelina Jolie, either, like in Beowulf.
Jolie playing a foxy assassin named, well, Fox. Fortunately. She has few lines but spends much of the movie with the hint of what on most mortals would be called a smirk playing at the edge of her world class lips, but in her case it's either a hint of bemused delight at the wilting power of her sexuality on the men around her or some variation of the smile on the Mona Lisa. Watching her stride across the screen is like watching a tiger pacing or listening to the low growl of Italian sports car engine purring in first gear.
Perhaps it's fruitless to think a summer action movie can excel at engaging both the teenage groin and the adult brain, but then again, Angelina Jolie can go from sex symbol to human rights ambassador with one flight in her private jet. As Brad Pitt can attest, sometimes you can have it all.
On Saturday night, I saw Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World at the LA Film Festival (the end credits dedicate the movie to Roger Ebert). Whether you enjoy Herzog's movies, especially his documentaries, depends quite a bit on whether you appreciate his world view. To steal some words from Bogdanovich, you see a Herzog movie, you know "who the devil made it."
This, his latest documentary, is a meandering account of Herzog's journey to Antarctica to understand what type of person goes down to the end of the world. Given a grant by the National Science Foundation, Herzog warned that he would not be going down to shoot another movie about "cute, furry penguins" but instead was curious about, among other issues, why men domesticated horses while he had yet to see a chimp or monkey riding a goat. Or something like that. It's not surprising, Herzog's attraction to people who'd choose to live and work in the extreme conditions of Antarctica. Give me your bold, your insane, your ambitious, and your bizarre, those living on the edge: that has always been Herzog's fascination.
If there were the equivalent of typefaces for voices, I'd pay an unbelievably high number for that of Herzog. Of course, it's not just his thick German accent but also his severe and often dour outlook on the world that combine to form one of the more distinctive voices in film. In one scene, as a linguistics expert speaks on screen, the audio fades out and Herzog's voiceover comes in over the image of that man speaking. Herzog muses that during the time that he listened to the man speaking, some three languages likely died out in the world. Another time, as a woman speaks on screen, the audio fades out, and Herzog chimes on: "Her story went on forever."
Much of the humor of the movie is in such directorial asides. On landing at Antarctica, his first stop is Camp McMurdo, of which he notes "contained abominations such as an aerobics classes and yoga studio."
When he does visit a small colony of penguins, his attention is drawn, naturally, towards the same odd behavior he seeks out in men. He asks the local naturalist who has been studying the penguins if he has noticed any signs of derangement in the penguins. Confused, the naturalist notes that he hasn't seen any penguins bashing their heads against the rocks. But Herzog has the last laugh as he spots one penguin heading off in the wrong direction, towards the mountains, and towards certain gloom, a point Herzog makes with a tone of utter satisfaction.
At movie's end, when Herzog seizes on a message of impending environmental doom and the extinction of humanity, it's almost so conventional as to be surprising. But the real unifying theme is a common quality in all the people he encounters there. They are all dreamers, but the type who've gone as far away from the rest of civilization as they can, and when they can go no further, they find themselves together, at the South Pole.
If you're wondering what kind of movie Wanted will be, these few excerpts will make it clear:
I'm seeing it tomorrow night as it opens the L.A. Film Festival. If nothing else, it looks to feature Angelina Jolie as a taciturn, moody, sexy assassin, which, all things being equal, tends to be how I prefer them.
We're launching a summer event at Hulu. Every weekday through mid-August, we're going to add something great to the site. We add videos everyday, but for this event we've gone out and pushed for some extra special content. We have an RSS feed for this event for you RSSegetarians.
First up? Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Enjoy!
By the way, isn't it only a matter of time before some scenes of Scarlett Johansson in this movie are mashed-up with footage of Barack Obama? Seems like Obama Girl's got some competition.
One of the projects I worked on when at The Edit Center in NYC is making it on air this summer as part of HBO's Documentary Films Series. Directed by MacArthur Fellowship winner Edet Belzberg, The Recruiter introduces us to Sergeant First Class Clay Usie, one of the most effective Army recruiters working in America, and four of the teenagers he recruits into the U.S. Army.
My classmates and I edited some of the early footage into scenes which our instructors assembled into a rough cut. One of our instructors, Adam Bolt, went on to be one of the two editors on the documentary.
I first saw the final cut of the documentary at Sundance in January. Having worked on the project, I'm biased, of course, but I really feel like it is that rare documentary that, in this day and age, presents a very balanced view of a topic that could easily devolve into either a liberal or conservative sermon.
It's also the first movie project I've worked on in which I have an official credit, as an additional editor, so it holds a special place in my heart.
This Harvard Business School paper confirms a phenomenon most Netflix renters are familiar with. People feel like they should rent Citizen Kane or Born Into Brothels, but those DVDs sit on the TV collecting dust while rentals like Must Love Dogs or Mr. and Mrs. Smith get watched and returned lickety-split.
The study notes, however, that this disparity lessens over time as people finally realize that what they want is not to have to think.
We predict and find that people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are rented before want DVDs (e.g., action films). This effect is sizeable in magnitude, with a 2% increase in the probability of a reversal in preferences (from a baseline rate of 12%) ensuing if the first of two sequentially rented movies has more should and fewer want characteristics than the second film. Similarly, we also predict and find that should DVDs are held significantly longer than want DVDs within-customer. Finally, we find that as the same customers gain more experience with online DVD rentals, their “dynamic inconsistency
With the fourth Indiana Jones movie just around the corner, this seems timely. A legendary amateur filmmaker shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has been been floating out there for many years now, with occasional film festival play and a decent amount of press coverage.
The first 10 minutes are available at YouTube now.
A writing professor once told me that if I typed out the entire text of James Joyce's "The Dead" that his soul would inhabit mine. Perhaps this is the filmmaking equivalent?
Trailer for The Fall by Tarsem. Showed its head at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2006 but didn't get picked up by distributors, but now, with David Fincher and Spike Jonze throwing their names behind it, a theatrical release looms.
I wonder who chose to go with just plain "Tarsem" instead of "Tarsem Singh." Was it Tarsem himself, or a third party? If one of my movies makes it to theaters one day, can I just have "Directed by Eugene" flash on screen at the start?
Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.
It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?
The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.
Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.
I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?
But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,
From the Criterion newsletter:
Our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.
Here’s what’s in the pipeline:
The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear
My roommate took me to a BAFTA screening of Speed Racer last Saturday. I didn't know what to expect, having only seen that trippy trailer once, but walking into the cacaphony of a Saturday afternoon screening packed with really young kids should've clued me in to the target audience, of which yours truly was definitely not a member.
This is a kids movie. A kids movie. Not like a Pixar movie, which people of all ages enjoy, but a kids movie, one that left me feeling nothing. Watching the CGI-heavy auto races reminded me of watching me of watching that canyon race in The Phantom Menace. In both cases, I didn't feel anything, not a sense of speed, or danger, or excitement. Maybe it's the immateriality of digitally drawn surfaces, or the highly-attuned ability of people to sense when the physics of collisions and motion of digital vehicles are just not quite true to life.
There are some interesting visual touches that caught my eye. Some shots with a close-up of a face in the foreground and figures in the other half of the frame in the background seem as if they were shot with a split diopter, both sets of people being in such sharp focus. It's as if the DP was trying to imitate the flat, deep focus look of animation like that in the original TV cartoon series.
But for the most part, I felt uninvolved, even bored. There are times when I find I can't enjoy something targeted towards a younger audience and feel, well, old. But in this case, it's not me, it's you. Or them. Or it.
Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?
Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)
New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.
Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.
Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.
Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.
Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?
Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.
The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.
Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.
Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.
***
The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:
Channing Tatum as Duke
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander
Sienna Miller as The Baroness
Ray Park as Snake Eyes
Dennis Quaid as General Hawk
Arnold Vosloo as Zartan
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty
Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President
Marlon Wayans as Ripcord
Hulu got a nice little review from John Gruber at Daring Fireball today. It's always a bit more exciting to read about your work at a site you frequent in your own day-to-day life, and Daring Fireball is a daily read for me.
Hulu, the NBC-and-Fox-spearheaded free online video service, is out of beta, and it’s pretty sweet. The video quality is good, the selection is good, and the advertising is remarkably minimal — two mid-show ads of 15 or 30 seconds for a 22-minute show, for example. Individual skits from Saturday Night Live, like this one from Saturday’s show, are commercial-free. Real movies, like The Big Lebowski and The Usual Suspects have just two or three minutes of commercials — and are uncensored. They even have good URLs.
No download option, alas, so there’s no supported way to watch these things on your TV, but it’s pretty damn cool overall.
Probably the movie I'm most excited about having at Hulu is Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. AFI rated it the number 1 comedy in movie history.
That Billy Wilder, he was a genius.