Saturday, December 29, 2007
Happy 3rd Birthday to us
I'm in Hawaii now sitting in the same room where I started plotting out Noise Film three years ago. I have no new insights today. I just wanted to note the occasion. Feel free to send presents however.
Oops...
It somehow seems tacky that the plots of films would be advanced by a slip of the lip. It really stuck out in Panic Room... "Well, I'll just take my million dollars and [ooops]..." Yet, slips of the lips have advanced the plot in quality films as well —Godfather II (I knew it was you Phredo!) and Brave and the Beautiful.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Progress report + balls of fury + Panic Room + Sky Captain + Bad and the Beautiful
We're still waiting on Dan for sound design and music. That's it for the progress report. Tonight I watched part of Balls of Fury. How can a movie have so many "ins" and yet suck so much? A takeoff of Enter the Dragon with ping pong + the smokin' Maggie Q + seeing what Jason Scott Lee is up to. It's a no brainer that I would rent it but it was really unwatchable.
I saw Panic Room last week. It was also unbelievably sucky but good enough to watch the whole thing. The movie was weak structurally--there just wasn't enough to push it along. The idea is that the bad guys are trying to break into the panic room to snatch a treasure. But it eventually becomes ridiculous. After surviving all sorts of mishaps the bad guys just keep on going. I mean, at a certain point, wouldn't you just give up? By the end, the characters have just become necessities of the plot.
Sean has been watching Sky Captain again so I've been thinking about that too. It's similar to Star Wars of course in that they both are influenced by mid-century serials. The main difference is that Star Wars is a modernist project while Sky Captain is a post-modernist one. Sky Captain really has no center. It is as if Kerry Conran just came up with a bunch of images he wanted to see and then developed the thinnest of narratives to string everything together. What we are left with is a pastiche that doesn't really make any sense. Example: the robot fight at the beginning of the movie. The robots are obviously straight out of the Max Fleischer Superman shorts but with a glandular disorder: they are about 20 stories tall (the comparable robots in Superman were just a little taller than a human). They made for a good fight in Superman because they were sized similarly and possessed similar capabilities. In Sky Captain, however, it makes no sense that a single plane is fighting a troop of robots on the ground. Plus, where is the military? Plus, exactly what kind of para-military organization does Sky Captain run? Everything in the film is thought out image-first making the film nonsensical and more impotantly, leaving it without propulsion.
One film I did watch all the way through was The Bad and the Beautiful. I can't believe I never heard of that one. It's a good film about films, a classic starring Kirk Douglas. Lots of good observations about filmmaking... it's one of the few films about films, paradoxically, that has something to say about making movies. Well worth watching if you haven't seen it.
I saw Panic Room last week. It was also unbelievably sucky but good enough to watch the whole thing. The movie was weak structurally--there just wasn't enough to push it along. The idea is that the bad guys are trying to break into the panic room to snatch a treasure. But it eventually becomes ridiculous. After surviving all sorts of mishaps the bad guys just keep on going. I mean, at a certain point, wouldn't you just give up? By the end, the characters have just become necessities of the plot.
Sean has been watching Sky Captain again so I've been thinking about that too. It's similar to Star Wars of course in that they both are influenced by mid-century serials. The main difference is that Star Wars is a modernist project while Sky Captain is a post-modernist one. Sky Captain really has no center. It is as if Kerry Conran just came up with a bunch of images he wanted to see and then developed the thinnest of narratives to string everything together. What we are left with is a pastiche that doesn't really make any sense. Example: the robot fight at the beginning of the movie. The robots are obviously straight out of the Max Fleischer Superman shorts but with a glandular disorder: they are about 20 stories tall (the comparable robots in Superman were just a little taller than a human). They made for a good fight in Superman because they were sized similarly and possessed similar capabilities. In Sky Captain, however, it makes no sense that a single plane is fighting a troop of robots on the ground. Plus, where is the military? Plus, exactly what kind of para-military organization does Sky Captain run? Everything in the film is thought out image-first making the film nonsensical and more impotantly, leaving it without propulsion.
One film I did watch all the way through was The Bad and the Beautiful. I can't believe I never heard of that one. It's a good film about films, a classic starring Kirk Douglas. Lots of good observations about filmmaking... it's one of the few films about films, paradoxically, that has something to say about making movies. Well worth watching if you haven't seen it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
