Probably my favorite new movie I’ve seen this summer is The Trip. This is a British movie that was evidently first a six-episode BBC television show and then was reedited into a feature film. This seems like a strange way to make a movie, as there must have been an hour or so of material from the sitcom cut out. But it works well. I’m curious to see what was included in the original show that was left out of the movie, but I don’t feel like anything is missing. As a film, it works well.
The story is about English actor/comedian Steve Coogan (played by English actor/comedian Steve Coogan), who is taking a road trip through the north of England, visiting restaurants and bed & breakfasts for an article he’s been contracted to write. He was planning on taking his American girlfriend, but she decided they need a break and has returned to America. So instead, Steve takes his friend, the Welsh actor/comedian Rob Brydon (played by Welsh actor/comedian Rob Brydon). The plot is really nothing more than these two traveling around, talking about what they would like to do in their careers, and working on various impressions. Yet there’s so much more going on.
The most immediately enjoyable parts of the movie feature the two competing with each other in performances. In one scene that will surely be remembered and replayed again and again, they both work on Michael Caine impressions. In another, they discuss wanting to make a period drama à la Braveheart or Rob Roy, and the conversation devolves into a hilarious bit about when a troupe of soldiers should rise before battle, whether they need to rise at daybreak or if maybe they could sleep in a little and get going by 9:30 following a continental breakfast. There are several set pieces along these lines that stand out and made me laugh incredibly hard. Before watching the movie, I had heard clips on the radio and seen some of the Michael Caine sequence in ads, and I feared that maybe I’d already experienced the best the movie had to offer, and though those scenes are some of the best, there are many, many more throughout.
What elevates this movie, however, is the quiet moments intertwined with the hilarity. Steve Coogan is a talented comic actor who has yet to really break out in America. My understanding is that in Britain, he is fairly well known for having played an iconic character for years on television. But in Hollywood, he’s still relatively unknown. I first saw him in the movie 24 Hour Party People (directed by Michael Winterbottom, who also directed The Trip), which is a fantastic film, and Coogan is great in it. I remember around that time hearing that he was going to break out and become an A-list actor as a result of that movie. The next thing I remember seeing him in was Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, another movie I loved. In this one, Coogan played Steve Coogan, a self-important actor who is hitting the big time following his performance in 24 Hour Party People. He meets with Alfred Molina and barely has time to spare for someone at Molina’s level of celebrity, which I found amusing in part because I would consider Molina more famous than Coogan, and now, years later, Coogan still hasn’t achieved the fame that the Steve of Coffee and Cigarettes seemed to feel was his due. I saw Coogan play Steve Coogan again in Winterbottom’s meta-adaptation of Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story. And for the third time, Coogan plays a version of himself in The Trip. In between these, he has been in bigger Hollywood movies, like Tropic Thunder and The Other Guys, but he has still never managed to become a household name in America. And this is the basis for the Steve character in The Trip. He is an actor who has been somewhat typecast as his television character in Britain and desperately wants to break out in Hollywood, but despite a decade of making movies, he has yet to reach the level he feels he’s entitled to.
The issue at the heart of The Trip is identity. Who is Steve Coogan? What kind of person is he? What kind of actor? Ultimately, the movie portrays him again and again as someone who desperately wishes to be something and someone he isn’t. Of course, actors make their living being people they aren’t, and that thread runs through the whole movie as both Steve and Rob attempt to be the better version of Michael Caine or of James Bond or of a Bond villain. Actors are supposed to not be themselves. But in The Trip, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are playing Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. And as the two interact, the differences between them emerge. Rob is married and has a baby. He is so aware of what makes him successful, that he has developed an iPhone app for one of his silly character voices. He’s content with his life and with his career. He’s a comedian. He’s an impressionist. He spends nearly as much of his time speaking in other people’s voices as he does his own, but he seems comfortable. He is most himself when he is Hugh Grant. Steve, on the other hand, is divorced. He chases younger women. He is a father but rarely talks to his children. He wishes he had the career of Michael Sheen. He thinks he has not been granted his due. He is discontented with his life and seems uncomfortable being himself. But, like Rob, Steve’s identity comes through most clearly and he seems the most comfortable when he is riffing on impressions and joking around. He is, deep down, a comedian, but he wishes he were a great dramatic actor. His failure to be himself, to accept who he truly is, is his great tragedy.
The Trip is fully worth watching solely on the merits of the comic scenes, but the exploration of identity lifts the film to another level. Steve Coogan, the character, is a modern Salieri, and Steve Coogan, the actor, plays the role so perfectly that it is clear he is a very talented dramatic actor as well as a talented comedian. I’m sure Steve Coogan could be a star on the level of Michael Sheen, but I hope he is content being Steve Coogan. That’s certainly good enough.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Super 8
Another summer movie I saw recently is Super 8. This one came fairly highly recommended. I had heard positive reviews and had friends comment on what a pleasure it was to see. Then another friend posted a comment on Facebook checking the generally overwhelming praise. He still seemed to think it was good, but not the greatest summer movie of our time. I was glad to read a few remarks going against the tide of praise to lower my expectations before I went to see it.
I didn’t go to it when it was still in its initial run; instead, I waited until it was at the second run theater at a nearby mall where matinee tickets are only two dollars and evening shows are four. I went to the 4:30 showing, and my ticket and a soda together cost less than the price of a ticket by itself at a first run theater. Of course, the sound system was a bit low tech, leaving the whole movie a bit muffled, and the seats have seen better days, but in order to save a few dollars, I’m willing to put up with the lesser accommodations, especially if it’s a movie I’m somewhat indifferent about or one that I’m seeing to stay out of the heat and kill a summer afternoon rather than because I’m desperate to see the movie itself. I saw Bridesmaids at this theater a couple weeks ago (and I still need to write about that one), and if I bother to see The Hangover 2, it’ll be either at this theater or on TV. But with Super 8, I actually wished I’d seen it at a nicer theater because it’s a movie that is well made and engaging enough to deserve the full theatrical treatment projected onto a big screen with high quality surround sound.
Let me not get carried away, though. The movie is good enough to deserve to been seen in all its glory, but that doesn’t mean it’s the greatest summer movie ever. Basically, it’s intended to feel like an old Steven Spielberg film, and it does achieve some of that feeling, but it also left me with the desire to go back and watch Jurassic Park and E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Super 8 is good, and it does capture some of the essence of those wonderful Spielberg films, but it also feels a bit like an imitation of them, a forgery of a master artist’s work.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the basic story, I’ll recap here. It’s 1979 in a small Ohio town. Our hero, Joe, is dealing with the death of his mother in a steel mill accident and the newfound reality of living alone with his father, who is unprepared to be a single parent. Summer vacation is starting, and Joe and his best friend Charles are excited to have more time to work on their 8mm zombie movie that they plan to enter in a local film contest (Joe handles makeup and special effects; Charles directs). They sneak out of the house one night to film on a train station platform, and as they film, a train derails. The Army comes to town to clean things up and investigate, and the mystery really begins: what or who was on that train? Why is the Army keeping things quiet? Why do all the dogs in town suddenly want to run away?
Strangely enough, the same elements that work as some of Super 8’s great strengths are also weaknesses. Charles, the young film director, talks about changing his script to add more story because that is what will move an audience. He read an article in a moviemaking magazine about the need for more than just special effects and thrilling adventure. So Charles writes in a wife for the main character, so the audience will understand what’s at stake for him. Charles also realizes that in order to stand a chance at making his movie stand out in the competition, he needs “production value.” So he films as the train passes by and ultimately derails so his film will have more going on than just kids standing around talking. Later, he films in front of the derailed train and near a group of Army guys. The same elements that Charles recognizes as essential to a good film are present throughout Super 8. The dead mother makes the audience more invested in Joe’s character. The conflicts between parents and children add more emotion. The derailing train sequence is a great example of production value, as are the other top notch special effects throughout the rest of the movie.
So if what we go to movies for is to have our emotions played with and to be awed with production value, then Super 8 is a great film. However, I sometimes felt like it was all a bit shallow, like J. J. Abrams, the writer-director, was really just a grown up version of Charles. All he wants to do is have fun making a movie, not because he has a story he feels utterly compelled to tell, but rather because he loves movies and wants to make one like the kind he loves. So the special effects and emotional twists come across as a bit manipulative rather than authentic. Just as Charles wanted to make his version of a Romero film, Abrams wanted to make his version of a Spielberg. I imagine him working on the screenplay and trying to figure out what would make this movie stand out, and just as Charles thinks, “I’ll give the guy a wife,” Abrams thinks, “I’ll give the kid a dead mom.”
It’s hard to explain exactly why I find it a bit dissatisfying. Overall, it is very well made. The audience is as skillfully manipulated as in just about any other movie. And I enjoyed the experience on a whole. Yet I also left feeling a bit empty, like this was only a great movie if I didn’t think too much about it. Or maybe it’s as simple as I mentioned earlier: the move left me really wanting to watch E.T. or Jurassic Park. Super 8 is a great example of just how good Spielberg is, though I can’t explain why he’s so much better than almost everybody else.
I didn’t go to it when it was still in its initial run; instead, I waited until it was at the second run theater at a nearby mall where matinee tickets are only two dollars and evening shows are four. I went to the 4:30 showing, and my ticket and a soda together cost less than the price of a ticket by itself at a first run theater. Of course, the sound system was a bit low tech, leaving the whole movie a bit muffled, and the seats have seen better days, but in order to save a few dollars, I’m willing to put up with the lesser accommodations, especially if it’s a movie I’m somewhat indifferent about or one that I’m seeing to stay out of the heat and kill a summer afternoon rather than because I’m desperate to see the movie itself. I saw Bridesmaids at this theater a couple weeks ago (and I still need to write about that one), and if I bother to see The Hangover 2, it’ll be either at this theater or on TV. But with Super 8, I actually wished I’d seen it at a nicer theater because it’s a movie that is well made and engaging enough to deserve the full theatrical treatment projected onto a big screen with high quality surround sound.
Let me not get carried away, though. The movie is good enough to deserve to been seen in all its glory, but that doesn’t mean it’s the greatest summer movie ever. Basically, it’s intended to feel like an old Steven Spielberg film, and it does achieve some of that feeling, but it also left me with the desire to go back and watch Jurassic Park and E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Super 8 is good, and it does capture some of the essence of those wonderful Spielberg films, but it also feels a bit like an imitation of them, a forgery of a master artist’s work.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the basic story, I’ll recap here. It’s 1979 in a small Ohio town. Our hero, Joe, is dealing with the death of his mother in a steel mill accident and the newfound reality of living alone with his father, who is unprepared to be a single parent. Summer vacation is starting, and Joe and his best friend Charles are excited to have more time to work on their 8mm zombie movie that they plan to enter in a local film contest (Joe handles makeup and special effects; Charles directs). They sneak out of the house one night to film on a train station platform, and as they film, a train derails. The Army comes to town to clean things up and investigate, and the mystery really begins: what or who was on that train? Why is the Army keeping things quiet? Why do all the dogs in town suddenly want to run away?
Strangely enough, the same elements that work as some of Super 8’s great strengths are also weaknesses. Charles, the young film director, talks about changing his script to add more story because that is what will move an audience. He read an article in a moviemaking magazine about the need for more than just special effects and thrilling adventure. So Charles writes in a wife for the main character, so the audience will understand what’s at stake for him. Charles also realizes that in order to stand a chance at making his movie stand out in the competition, he needs “production value.” So he films as the train passes by and ultimately derails so his film will have more going on than just kids standing around talking. Later, he films in front of the derailed train and near a group of Army guys. The same elements that Charles recognizes as essential to a good film are present throughout Super 8. The dead mother makes the audience more invested in Joe’s character. The conflicts between parents and children add more emotion. The derailing train sequence is a great example of production value, as are the other top notch special effects throughout the rest of the movie.
So if what we go to movies for is to have our emotions played with and to be awed with production value, then Super 8 is a great film. However, I sometimes felt like it was all a bit shallow, like J. J. Abrams, the writer-director, was really just a grown up version of Charles. All he wants to do is have fun making a movie, not because he has a story he feels utterly compelled to tell, but rather because he loves movies and wants to make one like the kind he loves. So the special effects and emotional twists come across as a bit manipulative rather than authentic. Just as Charles wanted to make his version of a Romero film, Abrams wanted to make his version of a Spielberg. I imagine him working on the screenplay and trying to figure out what would make this movie stand out, and just as Charles thinks, “I’ll give the guy a wife,” Abrams thinks, “I’ll give the kid a dead mom.”
It’s hard to explain exactly why I find it a bit dissatisfying. Overall, it is very well made. The audience is as skillfully manipulated as in just about any other movie. And I enjoyed the experience on a whole. Yet I also left feeling a bit empty, like this was only a great movie if I didn’t think too much about it. Or maybe it’s as simple as I mentioned earlier: the move left me really wanting to watch E.T. or Jurassic Park. Super 8 is a great example of just how good Spielberg is, though I can’t explain why he’s so much better than almost everybody else.
Captain America
Once again, as tends to be the case with superhero movies, Captain America was pretty much what I expected it to be. I didn’t know much about this character going in, and so I was intrigued at the set up of the weakling who wants to help his country and do the right thing but is unable to enlist until a brilliant scientist gives him a chance to become part of an experiment to create a new super soldier. After Steve Rogers is transformed from a ninety-eight pound weakling into a super buff fighter capable of helping the Allies destroy the Nazis, the movie takes a turn I wasn’t expecting with a really delightful song and dance routine. But, of course, we must get back to the action when Captain America goes out alone to save his old buddy from the bad guys with the evil plan to take over the world.
The plot from there isn’t too important to recap. The bottom line is that the movie does a good job of being what it is. My one major critique is the same critique I have of a lot of action movies in recent years, and that’s simply that it’s too long. By the final half hour or so, I was ready to be done. I don’t know if I have a short attention span or what, but I generally think ninety minutes is a good length for an action movie, comedy, horror, mystery, whatever. Anything other than a serious character-driven drama should probably be less than two hours. And any single action sequence should probably be no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Now, I wasn’t timing the big climactic action sequence in Captain America, but it sure felt like it went on for a half an hour or so, and I wanted it be done about halfway through.
It’s strange: I don’t have any specific problems with the action sequences. There weren’t any moments that stand out as being gratuitous, but on a whole, it was just too much. I think the tendency in recent years is to always try to make the newest movie bigger than what has come before, but bigger doesn’t mean better. I’d rather have smaller, with more specifically chosen moments that really work instead of throwing every possible event at the screen, hoping that something will be amazing. I have a feeling of déjà vu as I write this. Did I write this same thing about Thor or X-Men? It seems likely.
So here’s my general advice to directors making the next big blockbuster action movie: go for a lean ninety minutes. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience with too much action. Plus, if a movie is ninety minutes instead of over one hundred and twenty, the theaters might be able to squeeze in an extra showing each day, which means the movie could rake in even more money.
The plot from there isn’t too important to recap. The bottom line is that the movie does a good job of being what it is. My one major critique is the same critique I have of a lot of action movies in recent years, and that’s simply that it’s too long. By the final half hour or so, I was ready to be done. I don’t know if I have a short attention span or what, but I generally think ninety minutes is a good length for an action movie, comedy, horror, mystery, whatever. Anything other than a serious character-driven drama should probably be less than two hours. And any single action sequence should probably be no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Now, I wasn’t timing the big climactic action sequence in Captain America, but it sure felt like it went on for a half an hour or so, and I wanted it be done about halfway through.
It’s strange: I don’t have any specific problems with the action sequences. There weren’t any moments that stand out as being gratuitous, but on a whole, it was just too much. I think the tendency in recent years is to always try to make the newest movie bigger than what has come before, but bigger doesn’t mean better. I’d rather have smaller, with more specifically chosen moments that really work instead of throwing every possible event at the screen, hoping that something will be amazing. I have a feeling of déjà vu as I write this. Did I write this same thing about Thor or X-Men? It seems likely.
So here’s my general advice to directors making the next big blockbuster action movie: go for a lean ninety minutes. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience with too much action. Plus, if a movie is ninety minutes instead of over one hundred and twenty, the theaters might be able to squeeze in an extra showing each day, which means the movie could rake in even more money.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
In the past week I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One and Two. Both are good. They’re entertaining and satisfying conclusions to the series. I’ve been a Harry Potter fan for years now, although I was a bit slow to get into them initially.
I remember the first time I ever heard of Harry Potter was when I was in college. I was taking a class on Tolkien (which, unfortunately, I had to drop after the first class because it was an evening class and I was cast in a play that semester so had to attend evening rehearsals). The professor asked if any of us had read the Harry Potter books. There weren’t more than two or three of the books out at that time, and none of the movies had been made yet. I had no idea what Harry Potter even was, and neither did most of the rest of the class. It seems funny to think back on that now since Harry Potter is probably one of the best-known characters in the world.
Within the next couple of years, I heard more about Harry Potter. My father is a pastor, so I heard reference to the controversy within the conservative Christian community about how dangerous it was to allow children to read books about witches. My parents picked up the books to see what the hubbub was about and discovered how enjoyable they were. At some point, when I was on summer vacation maybe, I borrowed the audiobooks from my mom and got caught up in the fun stories (I still think audiobook is the way to experience Harry Potter; Jim Dale is an amazing reader). The first movie came out the Thanksgiving after I finished college, and I was living back at my parents’ house, so we all saw it together (there’s really nothing that makes one recognize his failure to truly enter adulthood like being twenty-two, living with his parents, and going with them to see a children’s movie). That first movie was decent if a bit too long and slow.
The next movie was likewise acceptable, but nothing particularly special. But by the third movie, the series really took off. And the final two really cement the franchise’s place in film history. It’s truly a phenomenal achievement to have made eight consistently high-quality films, especially when the beginning of the series is the weakest point.
I don’t really have too much to say about these final two films. I’m sure anybody reading this either already knows how good these movies are or doesn’t care and isn’t interested in the first place. There seems to be little middle ground with Harry Potter.
The one negative comment I’ll share about Deathly Hallows Part Two is that it has jumped onto the 3D bandwagon, which I feel is a mistake. It’s tough to know whether 3D is really the future of cinema or just a short-term fad. I suspect it’s a fad. I’ve seen a few movies in 3D, but typically I’d just as soon save the extra money and watch it in 2D. I think in the best cases 3D adds little, but in the worst cases it is an annoying distraction. I watched Deathly Hallows in 2D, but there were a few moments in the film where I was distracted by elements that seemed to be deliberately included to take advantage of 3D. There’s a roller coaster-like sequence in the goblin bank that is filmed like it’s supposed to simulate being on a ride at a theme park. Then a dragon lunges straight at the camera. I’m sure it looks cool in 3D, but the problem is that these moments distract from the story. I’d rather have filmmakers simply tell their story without trying to make things cool or to feel the need to use new technology simply because it exists.
I remember the first time I ever heard of Harry Potter was when I was in college. I was taking a class on Tolkien (which, unfortunately, I had to drop after the first class because it was an evening class and I was cast in a play that semester so had to attend evening rehearsals). The professor asked if any of us had read the Harry Potter books. There weren’t more than two or three of the books out at that time, and none of the movies had been made yet. I had no idea what Harry Potter even was, and neither did most of the rest of the class. It seems funny to think back on that now since Harry Potter is probably one of the best-known characters in the world.
Within the next couple of years, I heard more about Harry Potter. My father is a pastor, so I heard reference to the controversy within the conservative Christian community about how dangerous it was to allow children to read books about witches. My parents picked up the books to see what the hubbub was about and discovered how enjoyable they were. At some point, when I was on summer vacation maybe, I borrowed the audiobooks from my mom and got caught up in the fun stories (I still think audiobook is the way to experience Harry Potter; Jim Dale is an amazing reader). The first movie came out the Thanksgiving after I finished college, and I was living back at my parents’ house, so we all saw it together (there’s really nothing that makes one recognize his failure to truly enter adulthood like being twenty-two, living with his parents, and going with them to see a children’s movie). That first movie was decent if a bit too long and slow.
The next movie was likewise acceptable, but nothing particularly special. But by the third movie, the series really took off. And the final two really cement the franchise’s place in film history. It’s truly a phenomenal achievement to have made eight consistently high-quality films, especially when the beginning of the series is the weakest point.
I don’t really have too much to say about these final two films. I’m sure anybody reading this either already knows how good these movies are or doesn’t care and isn’t interested in the first place. There seems to be little middle ground with Harry Potter.
The one negative comment I’ll share about Deathly Hallows Part Two is that it has jumped onto the 3D bandwagon, which I feel is a mistake. It’s tough to know whether 3D is really the future of cinema or just a short-term fad. I suspect it’s a fad. I’ve seen a few movies in 3D, but typically I’d just as soon save the extra money and watch it in 2D. I think in the best cases 3D adds little, but in the worst cases it is an annoying distraction. I watched Deathly Hallows in 2D, but there were a few moments in the film where I was distracted by elements that seemed to be deliberately included to take advantage of 3D. There’s a roller coaster-like sequence in the goblin bank that is filmed like it’s supposed to simulate being on a ride at a theme park. Then a dragon lunges straight at the camera. I’m sure it looks cool in 3D, but the problem is that these moments distract from the story. I’d rather have filmmakers simply tell their story without trying to make things cool or to feel the need to use new technology simply because it exists.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Catfish
Another recent movie whose plot centers on Facebook is Catfish. The basic set up of the story is a twenty-something New York photographer named Yaniv Schulman (Nev, pronounced “neeve,” for short), who has a photo of his painted by Abby, an eight-year-old girl from Michigan. The girl contacts Nev, who develops a relationship with her family through e-mails, phone calls, and Facebook. Over time, Nev becomes particularly close to Megan, Abby’s older sister. But as they get closer, and Nev becomes more interested in taking the relationship from the virtual into the real world, he develops suspicions about whether Megan’s Facebook identity truly represents who she is. I won’t spoil the twists and turns the movie takes from there because I don’t want to spoil them for a first time viewer. The major theme of the film is identity and how we can forge new identities in a way that would have been difficult or impossible without our current technology, like Facebook.
There are several aspects of the film that sucked me in. One is simply the idea of relationships flowering via Facebook and how we can get to know people in a different way through this technology. I have friends whom I know in real life whom I’ve learned much more about through Facebook. I even have one set of friends whom I haven’t seen in years and whose courtship I watched unfold via Facebook. We aren’t close enough that I’ve sought out all the details of how they got together, but I enjoyed reading posts from each of them and piecing together the puzzle pieces as they moved from separate cities to the same city and then eventually announced their engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of their first child. It’s probably been close to fifteen years since I’ve actually spoken to either of them, but I feel like I am connected to them still through their online personas.
But do I really know about my friends’ lives? Maybe not. And how easy would it be to update one’s status with false information? I could easily tell my old friends from Arizona that I’m living in Paris right now or that I’m married with children or any number of untrue things. And who would doubt me?
As I watched Catfish, I pondered these things and thought how I must recommend this movie to my friends because it touches on some significant issues of our time. But I also thought as I watched the movie that it is not a great film as far as the quality of filmmaking goes. It is a low-budget, independent film, so I didn’t expect the same high gloss that I got from The Social Network. I was fine with the low-resolution images and shaky camera work. And, in fact, the film presents itself as a documentary, so the quality of filmmaking is completely justified as part of the movie itself. But then once I finished watching the movie, I looked up more about it and was surprised and a bit discouraged by what I read online.
I took the movie to be a fake documentary, like This is Spinal Tap or The Office. I thought it was an easy way to make a movie with a low budget. But what I discovered with some Googling is that the filmmakers insist that the movie is authentic. They admit to recreating a few close up images of computer screens, but insist that the story itself is completely true. This I find difficult to accept. And I’m not alone. Evidently, immediately after the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival, accusations began about its falsehood. There is ongoing debate about how much of the film is real and how much was staged, whether the filmmakers knew the truth early on and manipulated the situation for the sake of an interesting film or whether Nev was simply a love struck naïf (I actually wondered if Yaniv Schulman genuinely goes by Nev or if Nev was his persona for the film to underscore his naiveté). This controversy surprised me because I simply assumed early on that the movie was entirely fictional.
The filmmakers have defended their product with the claim that if Catfish is a hoax then Nev must be the greatest actor since Marlon Brando to pull off such a convincing performance, and they must be the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood to concoct such a convincing storyline. But the truth is that neither of those is true. In fact, as I was watching the film, I thought that Nev was not an especially adept actor as he often seemed to be “acting” the way a lot of people do in low budget indies. He seemed to be a little better than the guys in Clerks, but certainly didn’t achieve the believability of Brando. And the story has some interesting twists, but it also feels very plotted, very structured. The twists occur in all the right places. There’s the classic three-act film structure in place, so, no, these guys aren’t the greatest writers in Hollywood.
But the controversy about the reality of the film further underscores its themes about reality and identity, so that’s interesting, right? I don’t know. I find myself kind of annoyed by it. If the film is good enough on its merits as a film, it shouldn’t matter whether it is a real documentary or a work of fiction. I am reminded of similar controversies in the book world, James Frey, for instance, or the young adult anonymous diary Go Ask Alice. The question in my mind with such works is whether we would accept them and think them of quality if they were presented to us honestly. I have not read Frey’s book, but my understanding is that his book was not good enough to stand up as a quality novel, so it was only through trickery, passing the story off as true, that he achieved success with it. I enjoyed Go Ask Alice when I was a kid, but thinking back on it now, I can see that it is fairly unrealistic and probably would not hold up except as an overly moralistic and didactic children’s book if it weren’t presented as true. So what about Catfish?
I watched it thinking it was a fictional story, and I liked it just fine. But as I think back on it, pondering this question of whether it is real or not, I find more problems with it than I might have if I had simply accepted it as fiction to start with. The story feels maybe too plotted; the acting is somewhat too stilted. If judged on the standards of every movie out there, it isn’t a great work. If judged on the standards of a documentary, maybe it does hold more weight if it’s all true. But if judged on the standards of an independent film, made by filmmakers who felt they had a story to tell and wanted to find a way within their limited means to tell that story, I think it holds up. It’s a shame that the filmmakers don’t have the confidence to accept their creation for what it is.
Or maybe I’m wrong and they’re telling the truth that it’s authentic. I suspect that in the coming years, people will look back on this film as a small example of a hoax, along with Frey and Alice. Maybe now that the movie has gone through its theatrical release, they will admit that it was all a promotional stunt like the claims that The Blair Witch Project was real. I hope so because I think the question of its authenticity is distracting and the movie is worth considering on its own merits, even though they have their limitations.
There are several aspects of the film that sucked me in. One is simply the idea of relationships flowering via Facebook and how we can get to know people in a different way through this technology. I have friends whom I know in real life whom I’ve learned much more about through Facebook. I even have one set of friends whom I haven’t seen in years and whose courtship I watched unfold via Facebook. We aren’t close enough that I’ve sought out all the details of how they got together, but I enjoyed reading posts from each of them and piecing together the puzzle pieces as they moved from separate cities to the same city and then eventually announced their engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of their first child. It’s probably been close to fifteen years since I’ve actually spoken to either of them, but I feel like I am connected to them still through their online personas.
But do I really know about my friends’ lives? Maybe not. And how easy would it be to update one’s status with false information? I could easily tell my old friends from Arizona that I’m living in Paris right now or that I’m married with children or any number of untrue things. And who would doubt me?
As I watched Catfish, I pondered these things and thought how I must recommend this movie to my friends because it touches on some significant issues of our time. But I also thought as I watched the movie that it is not a great film as far as the quality of filmmaking goes. It is a low-budget, independent film, so I didn’t expect the same high gloss that I got from The Social Network. I was fine with the low-resolution images and shaky camera work. And, in fact, the film presents itself as a documentary, so the quality of filmmaking is completely justified as part of the movie itself. But then once I finished watching the movie, I looked up more about it and was surprised and a bit discouraged by what I read online.
I took the movie to be a fake documentary, like This is Spinal Tap or The Office. I thought it was an easy way to make a movie with a low budget. But what I discovered with some Googling is that the filmmakers insist that the movie is authentic. They admit to recreating a few close up images of computer screens, but insist that the story itself is completely true. This I find difficult to accept. And I’m not alone. Evidently, immediately after the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival, accusations began about its falsehood. There is ongoing debate about how much of the film is real and how much was staged, whether the filmmakers knew the truth early on and manipulated the situation for the sake of an interesting film or whether Nev was simply a love struck naïf (I actually wondered if Yaniv Schulman genuinely goes by Nev or if Nev was his persona for the film to underscore his naiveté). This controversy surprised me because I simply assumed early on that the movie was entirely fictional.
The filmmakers have defended their product with the claim that if Catfish is a hoax then Nev must be the greatest actor since Marlon Brando to pull off such a convincing performance, and they must be the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood to concoct such a convincing storyline. But the truth is that neither of those is true. In fact, as I was watching the film, I thought that Nev was not an especially adept actor as he often seemed to be “acting” the way a lot of people do in low budget indies. He seemed to be a little better than the guys in Clerks, but certainly didn’t achieve the believability of Brando. And the story has some interesting twists, but it also feels very plotted, very structured. The twists occur in all the right places. There’s the classic three-act film structure in place, so, no, these guys aren’t the greatest writers in Hollywood.
But the controversy about the reality of the film further underscores its themes about reality and identity, so that’s interesting, right? I don’t know. I find myself kind of annoyed by it. If the film is good enough on its merits as a film, it shouldn’t matter whether it is a real documentary or a work of fiction. I am reminded of similar controversies in the book world, James Frey, for instance, or the young adult anonymous diary Go Ask Alice. The question in my mind with such works is whether we would accept them and think them of quality if they were presented to us honestly. I have not read Frey’s book, but my understanding is that his book was not good enough to stand up as a quality novel, so it was only through trickery, passing the story off as true, that he achieved success with it. I enjoyed Go Ask Alice when I was a kid, but thinking back on it now, I can see that it is fairly unrealistic and probably would not hold up except as an overly moralistic and didactic children’s book if it weren’t presented as true. So what about Catfish?
I watched it thinking it was a fictional story, and I liked it just fine. But as I think back on it, pondering this question of whether it is real or not, I find more problems with it than I might have if I had simply accepted it as fiction to start with. The story feels maybe too plotted; the acting is somewhat too stilted. If judged on the standards of every movie out there, it isn’t a great work. If judged on the standards of a documentary, maybe it does hold more weight if it’s all true. But if judged on the standards of an independent film, made by filmmakers who felt they had a story to tell and wanted to find a way within their limited means to tell that story, I think it holds up. It’s a shame that the filmmakers don’t have the confidence to accept their creation for what it is.
Or maybe I’m wrong and they’re telling the truth that it’s authentic. I suspect that in the coming years, people will look back on this film as a small example of a hoax, along with Frey and Alice. Maybe now that the movie has gone through its theatrical release, they will admit that it was all a promotional stunt like the claims that The Blair Witch Project was real. I hope so because I think the question of its authenticity is distracting and the movie is worth considering on its own merits, even though they have their limitations.
The Social Network
I recently watched two films with plots centered on Facebook: The Social Network and Catfish. These two movies are certainly of our current time. They tell about the world as it is today. I was planning on writing one post about both films, but once I started, I realized I had too many thoughts bouncing around my head about The Social Network, so Catfish will have to wait. And even as I finish this post, I realize I have only scratched the surface of what I could say about The Social Network. I guess this is why I love movies so much. The great ones get my mind spinning.
It is interesting to think about how a movie that is so much about the present will hold up in the future. The Social Network was a frontrunner for the best picture Oscar this past year, which isn’t necessarily an indicator of a film’s lasting artistic merit, but I think The Social Network will still be recognized as a great film years from now.
When I saw it in the theater last fall, I thought it was gripping, which isn’t the adjective you might expect about a movie that is made up of scenes of deposition rooms and scenes of guys sitting at computers. But this movie absolutely holds up as entertainment. The script is tight, the dialogue buzzes with energy, the performances are successful, the direction and cinematography never left me bored. Just across the board, this was first rate. But when I watched it a second time a couple days ago and stopped to think more about the film as an artifact of our age and how it fits with other films and stories of other times, that is when the movie really stands out to me as a major achievement of the art form.
The movie that The Social Network most reminds me of is Citizen Kane. Both are stories about a man’s rise to wealth and prominence as the head of a major media outlet told through the testimony of those who knew him. In the case of Citizen Kane, the testimony comes from interviews conducted after Kane’s death while in The Social Network, the interviews are legal depositions of those who are suing Mark Zuckerberg. One of the big differences, of course, is that Kane dies at the beginning of the film and Zuckerberg is alive throughout. Furthermore, Kane lives a whole life, which we see from childhood through death, but we only see a period of a few years in Zuckerberg’s young life. The other major difference is certainly the medium that these two men work in. Kane was a newspaper tycoon; Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook. When I sift through all of these differences, I come to a conclusion: with the change in technology, the pace of life has altered.
Back when newspapers were a major influence on the world, the traditional story of a “great man” was the story of years, decades, an entire life. Now that newspapers are out of date as soon as they are printed and we rely on instant information constantly uploading on screens in front of us, the “great man” story takes place within the period of a few years. The pace of our lives has accelerated.
There is a term, which I have heard attributed to Hitchcock: the MacGuffin. This is the thing that sets a plot in motion. It’s the Maltese Falcon that everybody wants to possess, the bomb that the hero and villain both want to control. Citizen Kane has Rosebud at its center. The Social Network has Facebook itself and the billions of dollars generated from Facebook, but another possible view The Social Network’s MacGuffin is the girl who dumps Zuckerberg in the opening scene. She represents his hopes and dreams. At the heart of his story is a lonely guy who wants to get a girl to notice him. He wants friends, acceptance. He wants to be important and recognized. He wants comfort. In these ways, he is very much like Kane.
But here’s where the aspect of life moving at an accelerated pace becomes very interesting. Kane was about an entire life from birth to death. The Social Network is about a young man in his early twenties. Kane was on his deathbed full of regret, whispering “Rosebud.” The Social Network ends with Zuckerberg reflecting back on what he has lost. It was too late for Kane to change, but Mark Zuckerberg is not yet thirty. In this way, I see The Social Network as a much more hopeful film. Zuckerberg doesn’t have to die with regret. He still has the possibility open of truly becoming a great man.
It is interesting to think about how a movie that is so much about the present will hold up in the future. The Social Network was a frontrunner for the best picture Oscar this past year, which isn’t necessarily an indicator of a film’s lasting artistic merit, but I think The Social Network will still be recognized as a great film years from now.
When I saw it in the theater last fall, I thought it was gripping, which isn’t the adjective you might expect about a movie that is made up of scenes of deposition rooms and scenes of guys sitting at computers. But this movie absolutely holds up as entertainment. The script is tight, the dialogue buzzes with energy, the performances are successful, the direction and cinematography never left me bored. Just across the board, this was first rate. But when I watched it a second time a couple days ago and stopped to think more about the film as an artifact of our age and how it fits with other films and stories of other times, that is when the movie really stands out to me as a major achievement of the art form.
The movie that The Social Network most reminds me of is Citizen Kane. Both are stories about a man’s rise to wealth and prominence as the head of a major media outlet told through the testimony of those who knew him. In the case of Citizen Kane, the testimony comes from interviews conducted after Kane’s death while in The Social Network, the interviews are legal depositions of those who are suing Mark Zuckerberg. One of the big differences, of course, is that Kane dies at the beginning of the film and Zuckerberg is alive throughout. Furthermore, Kane lives a whole life, which we see from childhood through death, but we only see a period of a few years in Zuckerberg’s young life. The other major difference is certainly the medium that these two men work in. Kane was a newspaper tycoon; Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook. When I sift through all of these differences, I come to a conclusion: with the change in technology, the pace of life has altered.
Back when newspapers were a major influence on the world, the traditional story of a “great man” was the story of years, decades, an entire life. Now that newspapers are out of date as soon as they are printed and we rely on instant information constantly uploading on screens in front of us, the “great man” story takes place within the period of a few years. The pace of our lives has accelerated.
There is a term, which I have heard attributed to Hitchcock: the MacGuffin. This is the thing that sets a plot in motion. It’s the Maltese Falcon that everybody wants to possess, the bomb that the hero and villain both want to control. Citizen Kane has Rosebud at its center. The Social Network has Facebook itself and the billions of dollars generated from Facebook, but another possible view The Social Network’s MacGuffin is the girl who dumps Zuckerberg in the opening scene. She represents his hopes and dreams. At the heart of his story is a lonely guy who wants to get a girl to notice him. He wants friends, acceptance. He wants to be important and recognized. He wants comfort. In these ways, he is very much like Kane.
But here’s where the aspect of life moving at an accelerated pace becomes very interesting. Kane was about an entire life from birth to death. The Social Network is about a young man in his early twenties. Kane was on his deathbed full of regret, whispering “Rosebud.” The Social Network ends with Zuckerberg reflecting back on what he has lost. It was too late for Kane to change, but Mark Zuckerberg is not yet thirty. In this way, I see The Social Network as a much more hopeful film. Zuckerberg doesn’t have to die with regret. He still has the possibility open of truly becoming a great man.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Slaughterhouse-Five
Another movie I’ve been intending to write about and haven’t gotten to yet is Slaughterhouse-Five. This is another one directed by George Roy Hill. I think I watched this right around the same time as The Sting (maybe even the same day), but I wanted to wait and ponder the movie a bit before writing about it, and then I went out of town and was dealing with other life issues, and suddenly a few weeks had passed and I still hadn’t written about it.
I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.
When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.
The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.
One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.
There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.
One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.
Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.
I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.
When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.
The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.
One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.
There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.
One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.
Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.
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