Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I really liked the film Across the Universe. It’s both amusingly clever and an interesting look back at the 60s. Plus it’s a musical. I particularly liked the combination of “nothing’s going to change our world” with “helter skelter”–simple but effective.

I tend to like movies which take a more formal approach, like musicals. By restricting themselves and avoiding naturalism, they force the story to be both good and unusual. Or, of course, terrible–that happens pretty often too, but those movies can be ignored. A completely different example of a formal film would be Memento, with its trick of telling the whole story backward.

A film about the 60s naturally makes me compare that time to today. Many people then really thought society was falling apart or changing radically. The protests were dramatic and certainly changed U.S. society, but they had no real effect on the war. The protests against the Iraq War before it started were very large, though nobody thought they would change society, and they had no effect at all. And seeing that the Iraq protests had no effect caused them to more or less stop after the war started–there are still regular protests, but they are much much smaller than the ones before the war. Of course, the lack of a draft is a key difference.

Even after all these years of war it’s so strange to see men like Bush and Cheney, who were both careful to avoid going to Vietnam, sending other men to fight in Iraq. In a movie it would be simplistic. How does it happen in real life?

I found the movie Polar Express to be a very creepy experience due to the motion capture animation. It was like watching zombies riding a train to visit Santa (not to mention Santa’s entrance was straight from The Triumph of the Will). I think taking any child to see that movie would most likely scare the whole idea of Christmas right out of them.

I recently saw Beowulf, in which director Robert Zemeckis (who also directed Polar Express) makes another try at motion capture. And, I have to say, it is much much better. The character no longer look like zombies, which is really a vast improvement. Now they look like puppets. The main difference is in the eyes–they have evidently improved the technology significantly when it comes to tracking eye motion.

There are some movies where puppets would work fine. I mean, Team America was not a particularly good movie, but it wasn’t because of the puppets. Unfortunately, for Beowulf, which is intended to be a fairly realistic action movie set in a fantasy world, puppets really don’t work at all. The animation was continually distracting. The monsters (Grendel and the dragon) were moderately successful, because we don’t know how such beings should move. But the movements of the human characters were consistently unconvincing. This time around, the facial close-ups worked pretty well–not perfect, but not distracting. But larger movements were really bad. Also the weights of the characters when they walked or ran were all wrong–it looked like they were walking on a trampoline or something, sort of like the characters in Shrek.

I don’t know why Zemeckis is so fond of this technology. The Lord of the Rings movies showed that you can do superb effects with live action filming, and Beowulf didn’t require anything as complicated as Lord of the Rings. Also, plenty of animation movies have showed that you can excellent story-telling without life-like motion. Zemeckis is presumably trying to make entertaining movies, not experiment with animation. It’s not even a tip of the hat to older techniques, like those stop-motion animals at the start of Return of the Jedi. So why does he do it, when he must see that it doesn’t work?

I saw Neil Gaiman speak a few months ago. He mentioned his screenplay for the movie. As I recall, he said that he was talking to Zemeckis about some other project, and Zemeckis mentioned that he was interested in doing Beowulf, but couldn’t see how to transition between Beowulf killing Grendel’s mother and then, 40 years later, facing the dragon. Gaiman said something like, “well, I would handle that transition like this” and described his idea. Zemeckis asked him to turn that into a screenplay, and he did.

And it is an interesting idea, and it could make a good short story, though as a story it would have to be handled sort of experimentally. And maybe it would have made a good movie, too, but unfortunately I guess we’ll never really know.

(Nathan reminded me to write about this when I saw his blog entry about the movie.)

I grew up just outside of Boston. Boston is one of few places in the U.S. where people are from a very definite area, and you can hear it in their accent. New York may be like that too–certainly there are distinctive patterns of speech in Brooklyn and Queens–and not doubt a few places in the south, but in most parts of the U.S. people are from everywhere.

I recently saw Gone Baby Gone, and it does a great job of showing this. It was directed by Ben Affleck, who of course also grew up just outside of Boston. The movie was always set precisely where it was set, as opposed to some other movies which only used Boston as a stage (e.g., Blown Away, or Fever Pitch for all that it was centered on the Red Sox).

I thought Gone Baby Gone was a great movie for that alone. As a straight movie, I found it gripping and emotional but, in the end, overplotted. But the setting was really note perfect.

Also the supporting actors were excellent. The star, Casey Affleck, did a good job, but he always seemed to be what he was: a guy from Cambridge acting like a guy from Dorchester. Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman didn’t pretend to be from Boston, and the movie took the trouble to explain that. Michelle Monaghan’s background was never explained; I foune it unclear what she was doing there at all. But the supporting characters to be very well done.

Amy Ryan in particular was perfect. She really didn’t seem to be acting at all. She simply was a woman from Dorchester (though looking her up I see that she is actually from Queens). That was the most impressed I’ve been by an actor since Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener–although there he was obviously acting, albeit very well.