The grotesque world of Cars

Yes, but who stacked those cans?

What is strange about Cars is the way that its characters live in a world that implies humanity yet exists without humans. So the film's creators have to go through all sorts of contortions to make things work. Lightning has to press on a pedal to leave his trailer. Doc has to get on a hydraulic lift to hold court. Lightning has to talk to Mack on a special video screen. Yet who made the video screen? Machines and architecture all imply a means of design and construction. But there is nothing about a car—lacking both hands and mobility—that allows us to imagine how these things were created.

This problem is unique to Cars because in the other Pixar films the characters either live in the World (Toy Story, Bug's Life, Incredibles, Finding Nemo) or adjacent to the World (Monsters Inc.). Cars, on the other hand, takes place in an alternate universe in which the characters are fundamentally not at home; they live in a world they could have never made.

There's something grotesque about all of this. It's like falling in love with the look of plastic surgery in which the principal attraction lies in the fact that flesh has been manipulated. Cars asks us to accept a world without origin that exists only as image. This world does not derive from understanding or practice, but from a monstrous collage of fragments; manipulation pleasurable for its sheer novelty.

Happy New Years

At a certain point New Year's eve stopped being a big deal and now I'm mostly excited by the fact that I'm a year closer to retirement. I do find the following statistic amazing, however. Blogger tells me I wrote 183 posts in 2006. That's almost exactly an average of one post every other day. Lucky you. Happy New Year!

Gadgets, props and the Hamster EZ bake oven

Today I spent the morning making a Mindstorms NXT robot for Sean. It's an incredible toy that allows you to build machines and robots and then program them from your computer. The kit is Mac OS and Bluetooth compatible. This means that you can build your robot complete with servos and sensors, create the program on your computer using a drag-and-drop flowchart, and then send the program wirelessly to the robot. This thing is begging to be turned into some kind of prop or maybe some kind of art installation.

I was thinking about the design of our props. Now that I think about it, it surprises me that I made them look so good. My usual sensibility is to take store-bought items and then hack them with tape and cardboard. A good example is our hamster environment. Julia got Sean a hamster for Christmas. He really likes it but I found out that we're both really allergic to it. So after thinking about it awhile, I put the hamster outside in the covered patio next to the plate glass window. I put an interconnecting section of the cage into a blanket-covered cardboard box with a heater next to it. It sort of looks like a zoo exhibit where you can see a cutaway of the hamster's hole. The heater didn't last long--it flipped the circuit breaker on that side of the house so I put a 60 watt light bulb in the box instead, an idea I got from chick hatcheries. So there's a hamster cage in a box with a blanket with a lightbulb. The whole thing is fairly ridiculous, but Sean really likes it and even fell asleep looking at it. If we ever do another film, I think the props ought to be more stupid-looking.

Amazon.uk

Today I stumbled upon this photo of Amazon.uk. I liked it because it reminded me of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ben and Erik are away for the holidays so I'm taking a break this week. Hopefully we'll be shooting late next week. Earlier in the week I put the shrine interior into the shrine. It looked nice I thought. Of course I happened to build the shrine interior upside down so it didn't screw in right.

Cast & credits

Contact us: bodymemory { a } yahoo.com

Featuring
Ben Davis

Written & Directed by Ron Saito
Gaffer/Assistant: Erik Tyberg

Consultant
Gene Totten

Production design/props
Ron Saito, Erik Tyberg, David Callaghan

Second unit
David Callaghan

Thanks to
Gracie Mehren Davis
Tod Robinson
Gene and Mary Lou Totten
Jim and Caryl Tyberg
Jon Tyberg

Technical
Shot in HDV format on a Sony HDR-HC1
Edited in Final Cut Pro
Visual effects created in After Effects

A pair of oddballs

I saw Courage & Stupidity today, a short (30 minute) independent film about Steven Spielberg making Jaws. It's shot beautifully on 35mm and the performances are great though Kahil Dotay's Richard Dreyfus veers into parody now and then. It's a real oddball. For Jaws fans, there's not enough trivia and inside jokes for it to be satisfying. For the casual viewer, the film is structurally peculiar. Scenes seem to exist for no reason and the film meanders like the tides at Martha's Vineyard. The basic idea for the story--that the greatest film menace is unseen--is not bad, but the idea is underelaborated and overplayed. The dialogue is well written and the thing looks great, but the overall effect is like watching a sequence of nice moments with no emotional or thematic core.

The other day I was thinking "why isn't there some kind of Netflix for books? Wouldn't that be great?" Then I realized--library! Duh. I was reading a bit about Orson Welles while waiting for Sean as he played Arthur's Math at the library. So I checked out the Kane DVD and watched about half of it again tonight. It's a real oddball. The film is like a montage linked with dissolves. My thinking about this kind of showy production is that its art lies in drawing attention to itself without drawing the audience out of the story. Here's my theory: If you're visually distinctive but the audience gets pulled out of the story you're an experimental filmmaker. If you're not visually distinctive then you're a traditional filmmaker. If you can do both, you're a cinematic genius. And that is the gift of people like Orson Welles, Darren Aronofsky and Michel Gondry.

Making worlds

I'm still thinking about Lady in the Water. The one thing about Shyamalan's work that I find really annoying is the way that his film worlds bend to fit the script. Why does Story wear Cleveland Heep's shirt throughout the film? Well, because it emphasizes her waifish nature of course. But Bryce Dallas Howard's cinematically meaty legs side, it just seems silly to me. Couldn't Heep make a stop at the Gap? I had the same problem with The Sixth Sense. If that kid is so afraid of dead people, why is he always sitting in the dark? Why do the ghosts always look like the the most gruesome moments of their deaths? The answer is obvious--it's dramatic license. I understand that, but somehow, I find these discrepancies annoying. Note that I'm not saying that everything has to be explained. That would fill a movie with exhausting narrative minutae ("Sorry, Story, everything else is at the cleaners and, uh, my credit card is maxed out...")

I think there are different reasons for this problem. One is the difficulty of translating from script into screen. Sure everything reads well on paper then you have to go film it and the character has got to be wearing something. Or those doors in Monsters Inc.... I'm probably the only one who finds the third act door chase annoying because the door rails don't allow for efficient random access. The only reason that dry cleaner mechanisms work is because someone plucks the clean clothes from the rail. But in the battle between drama and sense, drama wins every time.



I think it comes down to what it means to make a world. World-making and film-making are two different things. In commercial filmmaking, the film usually takes precedence. But it is possible to imagine a film in which the world is consistent and internally coherent. Perhaps we should be reluctant to describe most filmmakers--bound as they are by the needs of their drama or audience--as makers of worlds. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe them as creators of novel dramatic situations. In my case, one of the reasons I think I'm creating a narrative and not a drama is that the world takes precedence over drama.

Jet Li's Fearless & Lady in the Water

Goals for the winter break: finish the bird scene, do the shrine close ups and whatever else we can fit in.

I watched Fearless the other day. I'm really surprised it has such a high metacritic score (70) and got a positive review from Slate. It's a transplant of the classic hero/Jerry Bruckheimer formula into the kung fu genre in which the hero descends into a heterosexual communist pardise of an abyss. Because of where I am in our film, everything I watch seems to be a lesson on structure. It took a looooong time for the hero to get to the abyss. Annoyingly long. We all know it's coming so I wanted the movie to get there faster.

If Fearless is a lesson in conventionality, Lady in the Water is a lesson in awkwardness. Every device used to keep the story moving seems contrived or clumsy. The overall effect is a bland sameness in which watching the film becomes an exercise in keeping up with odd characters with odd names. Portions of the film were surprisingly incompetent. The first appearance of the scrunt made me laugh. It was goofy. Also I'm really tired of scenes in which some character initially doesn't believe in what's happening. We all know it's just a matter of time. Shyamalan didn't seem to have a good handle on Paul Giamatti's character's change of heart.

I guess what's annoying about these films is that we all know that certain plot points are coming up and the filmmakers pretend we don't know that or handle the plot points clumsily. I guess it's just difficult. I'm still working on the "discovery scene" when Ben discovers the clue that takes him out to the desert. The first try--Ben doing a double-take--was just lame. My fault. That sort of thing is virtually unfilmable in this context. My next idea--fly flies from the spinner to the clue. Better, but maybe too cute. Maybe it's better to dispense with the idea of serendipitous surprise altogether. Maybe Ben is just looking through some papers and lo, there's the clue!

Going all the way

I'm always writing about films I can't watch all the way through. Here's my list of films I did watch all the way through recently.

My Super Ex-girlfriend
Talladega Nights
My Geisha (Shirley Maclaine from 1962)
Jet Li's Fearless

I guess the common element is that these are all frothy fare.

Also, I somehow missed until now the fact that the 7-disc Norm Mclaren box set just came out recently.

Subtlety begone

I've always believed in the idea of establishing a "palette"--of pushing an image too far—and not pushing an image enough—to create a space in which to work. Looking at the burned-out spinner now, I think I went way too far. I like it as an object, but I think we need to pull back and be more subtle when we shoot. Hmmm, maybe I could sell this thing on Ebay?

The Rosetta Stone

Here are some photos of the almost-done "Rosetta stone," the assemblage of clues that sets Ben going in a certain direction. These clues constitute a folk/bad/non-typically rational approach to reasoning. The reason I was working on the shrine interior last week was because a photo of it was necessary for this image.

Perpetual motion & the new physics

I stumbled upon this flyer prop for an earlier version of the ending of the film. I'm surprised I wrote as much text as I did instead of simply greeking it. Click to read.

The shrine interior & Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi

The shrine interior is pretty much done. When Ben and Erik saw it they laughed. I'm not sure what that means. I've written a lot about how making these objects is like performing and I finally have an example. When Martin Landau described his Academy-Award winning performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, he said that he tried to play the accent as if he were a Hungarian trying not to speak with an accent. This is pretty similar to what you have to do with props. If you age things and distress them like you're trying to show off the wear and tear, they look obvious and contrived. Instead, you have to really try to make the thing look good and straight and nice--in spite of itself. The "ex nihilo" letters, for example, are all crooked. But if you tried to intentionally make them crooked, they would look like the "Toys R Us" logo with the backward R. They wouldn't be believable. So I had to make the letters as straight as possible without using a ruler. As they started to droop (I didn't engineer them very well) I taped them to hold them in place. They continued to droop in places and that's what you see. "I'd like to thank the Academy..."

Bird mask reference

The terrible two's

Today we celebrate the second birthday of our project. It was two years ago today when I wrote the first treatment of the script while visiting my parents in Hawaii. The details have changed significantly but the basic storyline hasn't. If I want to make the two years sound longer, I just have to think, "we've been working on this thing for half of Sean's life."

Crafts & shrine interior

One of the weird developments of the past few years is the upward mobility of everyday crafts. This craft world draws consciously from the collage/assemblage/surrealist traditions (Joseph Cornell is a big favorite) rather than folk art (e.g., chickens and flowers and Pennsylvania Dutch). This makes Michaels a suprisingly good place to find materials for building props.

Above is the shrine interior in progress. The tin letters come from Michaels and are sold for use in scrapbooks. They are rusted with Sophisticated Finishes rusting products also sold at Michaels. The black background is cheap acrylic paint from Michaels. What looks like white calcium deposits is gesso undercoating purchased at Aaron Brothers.

The photos of children come from collage supplier Mantofev (mantofev.com). The ribbon comes from a scrapbook I purchased on Ebay. The cross comes from the San Gabriel Mission and is going to be augmented with cheap crosses from Michaels. The spinner segment, like the main spinner, was lasercut by pololu.com and rusted like everything else.

Narratives and bracketing

There were two ideas that enabled me to start on this project: narrative & bracketing. I don't know much about stories and I don't seem too interested in drama. But what I like about narratives is the idea that they are a tradable means by which we try to understand the world (see "no one cares about your stupid dreams" for more on this idea).

Bracketing comes from thinking about design. I suspect that design functions on one's ability to bracket out certain background features of the work. For example, using a computer to design a poster on ecological concerns involves bracketing out the problematic ecological concerns of using computers (mercury, PCBs, third world reclamation, etc.) themselves. The idea is not to let problematic concerns become transparent but to consciously set them aside so that we can pay attention to the content/narrative. Therefore, I guess this isn't a "cinema arts" project as much as a "narrative design" project.

More shrine reference

Been working on the shrine interior. The performance metaphor helps. It's like learning to hit marks naturally; tough to make it look natural. Here's more reference.

Frequency: why 32x fast forwarding was invented

Now that was a weird movie. Imagine, if you can, Field of Dreams + Sound of Thunder + Somewhere in Time + The Little Mermaid. What I remember: some really atrocious acting/directing, firetruck shot tight so that the shot can stand in for 1969, horrible montages, typical time paradox problems, split screen montage that doesn't respect personal space, mandatory-but-tiresome "can this really be happening?" sequences. Also, did I mention that this was a weird movie? Amazingly, if you check around the web, this seems to be pretty popular and well-reviewed.

Kudos go to anyone who can guess two other movies that were highly recommended to me.

Oops, wrong story

I sucked it up and read Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away all the way through. It felt like doing homework. The manna part, the part I was interested in, was only slightly elaborated upon and the story itself was mostly typical S & S stuff with weird worlds and weird people with weird names. Then I discovered I read the wrong story. I was supposed to read Not Long Before the End (in the same book) which I did enjoy. It was pretty much what I was expecting. An excerpt:

His last experiment involved a simple kinetic sorcery set to spin a metal disc in midair. And when that magic was done, he knew a truth he could never forget.

Research on Satan & ex nihilo

From guardian.uk:

The world God made soon turned out to be flawed, perhaps - as the Manicheans suggested, inherently evil. Who could be held responsible for its moral mess? Not God himself, who assures us throughout Genesis that his work is good; there had to be an agent of corruption, a tempter. Satan was therefore conjured up, created - as Kelly shrewdly remarks - out of nothing, like the universe that God allegedly fabricated ex nihilo. Once the stooge had been invented, he was demonised, turned into a bogey to frighten the credulous. Hence the red-hot eyes, the horns and the cloven hoofs, the shaggy pelt and the stink of sulphur. The iconography is a costume, wittily shed by the dandified, sophisticated Satans of the 19th century. When Mephistopheles appears out of a puff of smoke in Gounod's opera Faust, he shows off his natty cape, his plumed hat and a rapier with which he intends to prick all sanctimonious certainties. He is, he says with a Byronic grin, 'un vrai gentilhomme'.

read article

David Mamet On Directing Film

I read David Mamet's short but excellent book on directing film. His basic idea: follow Eisenstein, know how "the play's the thing" and everything else will fall into place. One of the reasons I respond to the book is because it echoes my sentiments concerning design (e.g. interface design). When I was more involved in that world, colleagues were always trying to fix interfaces using text labels. It drove me crazy. My feeling was that the label should be inherent in structure, that designing meant de-"sign"ing the project so that movement didn't depend on propositional cognition. In fact, half of Mamet's book is about this idea: getting rid of "narration" (what I've been calling "indicating") and letting the structure do the work. It's the same thing that drives me nuts about Trader Joe's cats cookies. There's a little label on the cover that says, "not for cats." That's not the way to solve the problem: change the stupid name!

So now I'm trying to Mametize our project as an exercise. But there's something about Japanese culture that is inherently sign-based. A lot of Japanese TV shows have continuous text scrolls (like we do on CNN here) and a lot of films are also filled with signage (e.g., Rampo Noir). I remember how everything seemed to be a sign in Tokyo, from audio cues on escalators to smells, almost as if Japan was an Empire of Signs.

Plus, our project is based on the idea of narrative, not drama as is Mamet's. My take on narrative stems from Jerome Bruner's work and is something like this: "a sequential working out of a non-canonical situation usually emphasizing human agency." This definition takes us in a different direction than Mamet's understanding of drama. In Mamet's thinking, a hero tries to solve a problem. But I don't think our perpetual motion device really qualifies as a problem. What we have is a narrative describing a potential battle between two forces concerning the development of a non-canonical (e.g., physically impossible) device.

Finally, Mamet's theory consciously ignores any sense of visual pleasure. But for me, this pleasure is a primary reason for watching film and hard to ignore.

Larry Niven & Cars

I've been reading Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away. Some goofy imagery and awkward dialogue, but the true ancestor of our film. This is one in which the world is more interesting than the book. We can ask this question of our film: if the world is more interesting than the film, is there still reason for the film to exist?

I've also been watching Cars with Sean. It's surprisingly sucky. It screens as though John Lasseter was concerned about the increasingly baroque quality of the Pixar films and wanted to strip everything down to the basics. But all this does is reveal the film's roughly-constructed mechanics. This is one of those films where the hero speaks his motivations and the filmmakers use clunky devices to keep the narrative rolling (characterization via interview? building a road? kicking a can into a garage?). To me one quality of a bad film is when I can start to hear the filmmaker's voices instead of the voice of the film. You can practically hear Lasseter thinking, "we've got to keep him stuck in the small town... but how? Now what is magic moment where we fall in love with this place?" It's the same reason I can't watch Adam Sandler films. I always feel like I'm part of a scheme to turn him into a romantic lead. In Cars, I never felt they resolved the awkwardness of using cars as characters and the car-thropomorphizing of life (vw bugs as bugs?). Then again they have 244 million reasons *not* to care what I think.

Tapping human potential

The other day I had to put something away in the laundry room and it struck me. It's beautiful. Our laundry room is a bad extension put on by former owners-- a cheap wood wall and a couple of windows with a brick floor. Now it's home to our washer/dryer and an unknown number of black widow spiders. But in a movie set way it really is beautiful with exposed pipes, peeling paint, a bare light bulb on the too-low ceiling, and minty green paint. So it might end up in the movie somewhere, maybe in the bird scene.

Still thinking about stillness. In David Lynch's Rabbits, nothing much happens. But the fact that there are people (er, rabbits) there creates a tension: something COULD happen. Harakiri is another example. A lot of the movie is just two guys talking and a bunch of samurais watching. But the stillness becomes activated by the potential for characters to act. The difference between Rabits and Harakiri is that in Rabbits, our expectations are confounded whereas in Harakiri, our expectations are fulfilled in a climactic brawl.

Great movies

I just couldn't make it through Superman Returns. At a certain point--I think it was when Superman x-ray visions Lois's home life--it turned into a movie of the week. My favorite part of the movie was casting James Marsden as Kate Bosworth's love interest. It's a funny joke that Lois Lane would be cohabitating with an X-man and I was always sort of curious what his eyes looked like. BTW, I liked X-Men 3 just fine.

The other week Ben's wife Krissy asked me, "so what movies do you like?" I get this sort of question all the time since apparently I sound like some sort of hater.

So here are movies that I think are great movies.

Ed Wood
Richly textured visually, thematically and emotionally.

Living in Oblivion
Funny and instructional.

Starship Troopers
Discover your inner Nazi with "the best pro/anti war film ever made."

Team America World Police
Intelligent, multi-layered, fantastic satire and totally stupid.

Harakiri
It's genetic.

*I added the following later...

The Matrix
Duh.

The Godfather
Everyone's favorite.