Tag Archives: special effects

The Most Unlucky Man: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus movie poster

 

Terry Gilliam is bur­dened with num­ber of unfair rep­u­ta­tions. First, as a visual styl­ist more than a sto­ry­teller or direc­tor of actors — the lat­ter, at least, obvi­ously refuted by the fact that many high-profile stars will repeat­edly work with him for pen­nies. He’s also known as an unpre­dictable hel­lion and spend­thrift, which are, from the point of view of those that hold the purs­es­trings, the two least desir­able char­ac­ter­is­tics in a direc­tor. He may in fact be con­cerned more with the integrity of the work than with the busi­ness angle, as any artist should be, but he is no wastrel. In fact, all but one of his com­pleted movies came in on time and under bud­get. A bet­ter way to describe him would be as the most unlucky per­son in the movie business.

After the mul­ti­ple calami­ties and mis­for­tunes (that even an athe­ist might char­ac­ter­ize as acts of god) that befell The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam made The Broth­ers Grimm as a com­mer­cial con­ces­sion. Despite it still bear­ing his unmis­tak­able impri­matur, it remains the sole Gilliam film I actively dis­like. One good thing to come of it, how­ever, was a gen­uine friend­ship with its star Heath Ledger. Inter­ested in film­mak­ing him­self, Ledger stuck around on the set of The Imag­i­nar­ium of Doc­tor Par­nas­sus even when not needed on cam­era, serv­ing as Gilliam’ appren­tice and pitch­ing in when­ever possible.

Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Can you put a price on your dreams?”

Gilliam’s fabled bad luck first reared when he was hit by a bus and cracked a ver­te­bra, as reported in Wired. Ledger died dur­ing pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by pro­ducer William Vince before post-production could begin. If one untimely death could pos­si­bly be said to be any more of a shame than another, Ledger’s acci­den­tal over­dose at the age of 28 might be truly unfair. He was rid­ing the crest of a wave of appre­ci­a­tion for his per­for­mances in Broke­back Moun­tain and Bat­man: The Dark Knight, and had just begun to stretch his mus­cles as a direc­tor with music videos for Ben Harper and Mod­est Mouse.

The pro­duc­tion was very nearly halted, but Gilliam real­ized it could be sal­vaged and re-conceived if Ledger’s part were par­tially recast with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Far­rell. Gilliam stuck to one sim­ple and absolute cri­te­ria: all three actors must be per­sonal friends of Ledger, lead­ing him to report­edly turn down an over­ture by none less than Tom Cruise on the basis that he hadn’t known Ledger. Depp and Law actu­ally do quite resem­ble Ledger onscreen, at least with the aid of eye­liner and cos­tum­ing. How­ever, Far­rell most cap­tures Ledger’s phys­i­cal pres­ence and man­ner­isms. Charm­ingly, the movie is cred­ited not to Gilliam but to “A film from Heath Ledger and friends.”

Lily Cole in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Voila!”

The eerie syn­chronic­ity between Ledger’s death and the film’s themes of mor­tal­ity are, remark­ably, coin­ci­den­tal. Gilliam co-wrote the script with Charles McK­e­own (also of Brazil and The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen, which this movie most closely resem­bles). Accord­ing to Col­lider, the story is based on Gilliam’s own feel­ings of artis­tic frus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­larly after the recep­tion of his con­tro­ver­sial film Tide­land, which many found not just dif­fi­cult but even offensive.

As its title makes plain, The Imag­i­nar­ium of Dr. Par­nas­sus is set lit­er­ally in a world of imag­i­na­tion, a place we have vis­ited before in nearly every sin­gle Gilliam film. Most famously, Brazil riffs on James Thurber’s 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Wal­ter Mitty.” The few excep­tions include Jab­ber­wocky and The Broth­ers Grimm, in which fairy tales exist mat­ter of factly in the real world. In 12 Mon­keys, it remains ambigu­ous if James Cole’s (Bruce Willis) future (his present) or the present (his past) might be real or delusions.

Tom Waits in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“He’s come to collect.”

It would be a huge mis­take to expect any Terry Gilliam film to make total log­i­cal sense. Such pedes­trian expec­ta­tions would weigh down an artist we love for his unique, vivid flights of fancy. But per­haps even the wildest Gilliam fancy ought to be inter­nally con­sis­tent to a degree. If some­thing doesn’t make sense, is it a tan­ta­liz­ing conun­drum left open for the viewer to mull over, or is it evi­dence of slop­pi­ness? The cen­tral ques­tion left unan­swered for me has to do with the core con­ceit of the film itself: peo­ple are drawn into the mind of Dr. Par­nas­sus through his mag­i­cal mir­ror. In his mind­scape, they must choose between enter­ing a build­ing main­tained by the Devil (Tom Waits), or… what, exactly? Of those few that reject the Devil, we see their bliss­ful, unen­cum­bered state upon leav­ing Dr. Par­nas­sus’ mind. What exactly hap­pens to them that makes them happy? Also, there’s the side effect of them shed­ding their pos­ses­sions. They may have been freed of their own earthly mate­ri­al­ism, but that doesn’t stop Par­nas­sus from con­ve­niently enrich­ing his own troupe’s cof­fers, giv­ing the whole process an air of a scammy con­fi­dence game instead of spir­i­tual awak­en­ing. Reflect­ing the theme of insin­cer­ity is the corn­ball tune “We Are the Chil­dren of the World” which appears as a ring­tone in the film, and at the end of the clos­ing credits.

The appar­ent pro­tag­o­nist turns out to be an unre­deemable vil­lain, unlike vir­tu­ally all of Gilliam’s pre­vi­ous heroes, in par­tic­u­lar Kevin in Time Ban­dits, Jack Lucas in The Fisher King, Sam Lowry in Brazil, James Cole in 12 Mon­keys, and Jeliza-Rose in Tide­land. Which leaves us with Dr. Par­nas­sus, who ends up a lit­tle bit like Parry (Robin Williams) as we meet him at the begin­ning of The Fisher King: home­less and seem­ingly per­ma­nently locked in a posi­tion of want. Both are hobos, ren­dered apart and invis­i­ble from a world of beauty and wealth. Par­nas­sus’ long­ings are embod­ied by the beau­ti­ful Valentina (Lily Cole), whom may or may not be his daugh­ter, now seen ensconced in an envi­ously bliss­ful nuclear fam­ily. Par­nas­sus remains for­ever tempted by the Devil.

Offi­cial movie site: www.doctorparnassus.com

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

Avatar

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Avatar movie poster

 

Avatar is the per­fect dis­til­la­tion of all of James Cameron’s worst ten­den­cies: an obses­sion with marines (while try­ing to have it both ways: wor­ship­ping the hard­ware and lingo, but cast­ing them as vil­lains), embar­rass­ingly heinous dia­logue (under­cut­ting every dra­matic moment with some­body dron­ing flat one-liners like “oh shit” or “this’ll ruin my day”), a token wise Latina avail­able for cleav­age and wise­cracks (Michelle Rodriguez, more wise than most of the white and/or blue peo­ple, any­way), a greater inter­est in tech­nol­ogy over peo­ple (both on screen and behind the scenes), and a core anti-war mes­sage con­tra­dicted by glo­ri­fied slaugh­ter and explosions.

If Cameron had a pur­pose in mind for Avatar other than as a showreel of the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, it seems to be an endorse­ment of vio­lent protest. If so, the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion of Iran might find some­thing of inter­est here. More the pity the Na’vi didn’t hap­pen to be green, in which case crit­ics might be dis­cussing the film in terms of cur­rent events instead of being dis­tracted by the shiny spe­cial effects mask­ing the soul­less nar­ra­tive and blank act­ing (with the sig­nif­i­cant excep­tion of a very funny Gio­vanni Ribisi and espe­cially Zoe Sal­daña, who man­ages to make an impres­sion despite not tech­ni­cally appear­ing on screen, as a con­ven­tional pho­to­graph, anyway).

Yes YesStory Roger Dean AvatarDetail from Roger Dean’s sleeve for Yes’ YesStory on the left, scene from Avatar on the right.

The offi­cial Avatar talk­ing points require men­tion of the sundry tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs that come teth­ered to every Cameron film, mostly hav­ing to do with com­put­ers. The Ter­mi­na­tor (1984) and Aliens (1986) were rel­a­tively quaint in their uti­liza­tion of mod­els and stop-motion ani­ma­tion, but The Abyss (1989), Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judge­ment Day (1991), and Titanic (1997) debuted new com­puter ani­ma­tion tech­niques, for the first time fully inte­grated with live action pho­tog­ra­phy. I clearly recall watch­ing T2 with an audi­ence gasp­ing and applaud­ing in amaze­ment dur­ing a shot in which the liq­uid metal robot T-1000 (Robert Patrick) lit­er­ally turned itself inside out. There’s noth­ing in Avatar to com­pare to that com­mu­nal moment of delighted awe in 1991; my 2010 Avatar audi­ence oohed and aahed dur­ing the first 3D effects vis­i­ble in the attached trail­ers (mostly for dis­pos­able kid­die movies like Despi­ca­ble Me), but our eye­balls were already beaten into sub­mis­sion by the time the main fea­ture rolled, and the packed house sat silently through the 162 minute-long bar­rage of computer-processed flim-flam.

I’ll spend a para­graph on the pos­i­tive: Steven Soder­bergh, who pre­vi­ously col­lab­o­rated with Cameron on Solaris, report­edly said after see­ing the film that “There’s gonna be before that movie and after”. It is inar­guable that Avatar marks the tip­ping point in at least two key film­mak­ing tech­niques we’re cer­tain to see even more of in the imme­di­ate future: 3D pho­tog­ra­phy and vir­tual film­mak­ing (the con­gru­ence of pho­to­re­al­is­tic CGI with motion cap­ture, basi­cally a tur­bocharged update to the old prac­tice of roto­scop­ing). The superla­tive 3D is applied equally well to both the live-action and ani­mated sequences (indeed, most of the film is a meld­ing of the two). It’s more refined and sub­tle than any 3D film I’ve seen before, includ­ing U23D, Beowulf, and Cora­line, all of which resorted to in-your-face show­ing off com­mon since the early days of The Crea­ture From the Black Lagoon (1954) and Dial M for Mur­der (1954). Mean­while, the motion-captured CGI char­ac­ters are even more smoothly inte­grated with live-action pho­tog­ra­phy than pre­vi­ous high-water marks like the T-1000 in T2, Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) in George Lucas’ Star Wars pre­quel tril­ogy, and Gol­lum (Andy Serkis) in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings tril­ogy. And that’s not even to men­tion the star­tlingly detailed and immer­sive computer-generated back­grounds and environments.

Yes Keys to Ascension Roger Dean AvatarDetail from Roger Dean’s cover for Yes’ Keys to Ascen­sion on the left, Avatar on the right. As artist Dave McK­ean rightly opined on Twit­ter, “Roger Dean should sue!”

The other big talk­ing point is of course its stag­ger­ing expense. It’s hard to remem­ber now, years after Titanic’s box office receipts broke records world­wide, but its $200 mil­lion bud­get was orig­i­nally an object of ridicule and put the very exis­tence of two vast cor­po­ra­tions at stake (20th Cen­tury Fox and Para­mount). Avatar takes the account­ing to the insane level of circa $237 mil­lion, but Cameron’s instincts appear again to have been right; Avatar has already (at this time of writ­ing) earned a bil­lion dol­lars world­wide, a mere two weeks after release.

As guest Dork Reporter Snark­bait wisely pre­dicts, 10 years from now Avatar’s spe­cial effects will be laugh­able, and all that will be left is the story. And when that story is a warmed-over retelling of the Euro­pean con­quest of Amer­ica (more recently retold in Ter­rence Malick’s The New World and as Slash­Film notes, Disney’s Poc­a­hon­tas) set in a sci-fi world seem­ingly stolen from the paint­ings of Roger Dean, isn’t the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars worth of tech­nol­ogy and years of pro­duc­tion all for naught? It’s impos­si­ble not to com­pare this folly to the Star Wars pre­quels, made long after Lucas fell down the rab­bit hole of obses­sion with film­mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and no longer had any­one around him will­ing or capa­ble to say no. This Dork Reporter hap­pened to watch (500) Days of Sum­mer and Up in the Air right before and after Avatar, and can attest that there is no sub­sti­tute for good writ­ing and act­ing. Peo­ple will still be rewatch­ing films like those long after Avatar is forgotten.

Offi­cial site: www.avatarmovie.com

Must read: The blog Papyrus Watch catches the use of the cliched font in the movie logo and sub­ti­tles. Papyrus was designed in 1982 and is now com­monly found pre­in­stalled on most computers.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button movie poster

 

This Dork Reporter is slowly cool­ing on for­mer favorite David Fincher. His under­rated first fea­ture Alien3 is highly com­pro­mised, but eas­ily the next most the­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing entry in the Alien fran­chise (after, of course, Rid­ley Scott’s rich orig­i­nal). Se7en is one of the most gut-wrenchingly dis­turb­ing movies ever made, notable for hav­ing vir­tu­ally no vio­lence appear onscreen, despite its rep­u­ta­tion. Fight Club is per­haps the movie of the nineties, an eccen­tric blast of coun­ter­cul­tural fury. But almost every­thing that fol­lowed seemed a dis­ap­point­ment. The Game was wildly implau­si­ble with­out the pop and siz­zle that car­ried the sim­i­larly over-the-top Fight Club. Panic Room was an empty exer­cise in style, seem­ingly con­ceived solely for Fincher to exper­i­ment with new dig­i­tal tech­niques that would allow him to cre­ate impos­si­bly con­tin­u­ous cam­era moves through the walls and floors of a city brown­stone (and pos­si­bly also as another vehi­cle for star Jodie Foster’s per­sona as a sin­gle par­ent to be reck­oned with). Zodiac was highly praised both as a tight pro­ce­dural thriller and as a tour-de-force of still more bleeding-edge dig­i­tal spe­cial effects (so good that most view­ers wouldn’t sus­pect that many sequences were not tra­di­tion­ally shot in cam­era), but it did absolutely noth­ing for me. I’m won­der­ing if I missed some key aspect of it that would open it up to me — and that per­haps I should reap­praise it now that a director’s cut is avail­able on DVD.

Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonYou’re only as old as you feel

The advance mar­ket­ing for The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton excited me at first, but I was appre­hen­sive when I learned the screen­play (loosely based on a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzger­ald) was by Eric Roth, the writer of For­rest Gump. Indeed, it did turn out to be con­structed in a sim­i­lar vein and tone, even mim­ic­k­ing some of the corni­est devices of Gump: the famous dig­i­tal feather twirling in the wind has been replaced by an unlikely reap­pear­ing hum­ming­bird; Forrest’s mother’s apho­rism “life is like a box of choco­lates; you never know what you’re going to get” has its ana­log in the less mem­o­rable “you never know what’s com­ing for you”; even For­rest Gump’s parade of cameos by famous or infa­mous Amer­i­cans is here con­tin­ued with an appear­ance by Teddy Roo­sevelt. Against my will, this cutesi­ness did suc­ceed in draw­ing me in for most of its run­ning time. I was engrossed for much of it, but its leisurely three-hour run­ning time hon­estly strained my patience by about the two-hour mark.

Fincher and Roth relate the decades-long story via the fram­ing device of Benjamin’s (Brad Pitt) one true love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) on her deathbed, intro­duc­ing her adult daugh­ter Car­o­line (Julia Ormond) to her bio­log­i­cal father through a dra­matic read­ing of his diary, with gaps filled in from her own mem­ory. A soon-to-be infa­mous hur­ri­cane brews out­side the Louisiana hos­pi­tal room, shortly to erase much of Ben­jamin and Daisy’s milieu. The mul­ti­ple lay­ers of sto­ry­telling result is no less than three speak­ing voices to nar­rate the tale in voiceover. One fram­ing device too far?

Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonCate Blanchett is a beau­ti­ful woman, but it’s eerie to see her appear to be in her 20s

The cen­tral con­ceit of the story is a fan­tas­ti­cally unfor­tu­nate dis­ease that afflicts one Ben­jamin But­ton. His body is born aged and decrepit, and ages back­wards while his mind matures nor­mally. As he aptly puts it when still a boy, he was “born old.” Tak­ing this story as any­thing other than a para­ble or fairy tale would be to miss the point, but the pho­to­re­al­is­tic spe­cial effects place the movie firmly in believ­able real­ity. So this viewer’s mind (when not dis­tracted by the high-tech visu­als) wan­dered into logis­tics. Some of the rules don’t seem to hold up: as a chrono­log­i­cal ado­les­cent, he man­i­fests the typ­i­cal sex­ual desires and self-centeredness. But his aged body strangely has the phys­i­cal fit­ness and stamina/potency to act them out (we see him preen­ing in front of a mir­ror, seem­ingly only aged from the neck up). Also, pre­sum­ably, Ben­jamin can be assured to die when his body regresses to infancy. So, given his phys­i­cal state at birth, is his death date pre-ordained? If he had been born with an infan­tilized body of a 20-year old, could he have been assured of only hav­ing two decades to live? Is he imper­vi­ous to harm? Indeed, he some­how man­ages to sur­vive being stepped on as a new­born, and later, is one of the few sur­vivors of a Ger­man sub­ma­rine attack on an out­classed tug­boat dur­ing World War II.

Ben­jamin is adopted by Quee­nie (Taraji P. Hen­son), an unfor­tu­nately stereo­typ­i­cal African Amer­i­can char­ac­ter, and spends his youth and old age (and vice versa!) at the nurs­ing home she man­ages. There, he meets his one true love Daisy, the niece of one of the ten­ants. Benjamin’s curi­ous con­di­tion pre­vents him from hav­ing any kind of nor­mal friend­ship or rela­tion­ship with her, so he leaves home to find his way in the world. He has his first seri­ous rela­tion­ship with Eliz­a­beth Abbott (Tilda Swin­ton), an older woman who thinks she’s younger than him (later, we learn that meet­ing him helped her change her life). Even­tu­ally, Ben­jamin and Daisy do meet at roughly the same phys­i­cal age and con­sum­mate their mutual love. When Daisy quite rightly asks Ben­jamin if he will still love her when she’s old and wrinkly, he jok­ingly turns it around and asks if she will still love him when he has acne. But what first amuses even­tu­ally comes back around to become one of the most painfully emo­tional sequences in the whole movie: Ben­jamin does after all regress into senil­ity (or per­haps even Alzheimer’s, before it was iden­ti­fied), trapped in the body of a pim­ply teenager. As always, the point is that the bell curve of a human life can be seen as a mir­ror image of itself: here, the impetu­ous­ness, aggres­sion, and mood swings of senil­ity are equated with the tumult of ado­les­cence. Like­wise, extreme youth and old age both are char­ac­ter­ized as the ulti­mate states of depen­dence and vulnerability.

Tilda Swinton in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonTilda Swin­ton as Benjamin’s first lover, an older woman whom he allows to believe is younger

The spe­cial effects that allow an aged ver­sion of Pitt’s face to be super­im­posed over another, diminu­tive actor are light years in advance of the still-creepy dig­i­tal roto­scop­ing ani­ma­tion style used in Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express and Beowulf (although the lat­ter is an excel­lent film in spite of the inef­fec­tive effects). But no mat­ter how eerily fluid and seam­less the effects, I could not shake the feel­ing that I was watch­ing some­thing largely actu­al­ized by ani­ma­tors equipped with a giant com­puter server farm. These obvi­ously cut­ting edge tech­niques are more com­pre­hen­si­ble to me than what­ever the makeup and/or CG wiz­ards did to make 44-year-old Pitt and the 39 Blanchett appear to be in their smooth-skinned and limber-limbed 20s. Also, it must be said that an arti­fi­cially aged Pitt in his hypo­thet­i­cal 50s and 60s is a dead ringer for Robert Redford.

There must be some­thing in the bot­tled water film­mak­ers have been drink­ing recently, for I’ve noticed a decided trend towards movies about aging recently. Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (read The Dork Report review) and Tamara Jenkin’s The Sav­ages (read The Dork Report review) both look at the senil­ity than often comes at the end of life, and how it may affect the lives of those still liv­ing, for bet­ter or for worse. But another pair of movies dealt with mor­tal­ity and the fear of unfin­ished busi­ness through the lens of fan­tasy: Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Youth With­out Youth (read The Dork Report review) and Char­lie Kaufman’s Synec­doche, New York (read The Dork Report review). All of these movies tap into most people’s fear of aging: not only of los­ing phys­i­cal health and thus inde­pen­dence, but also of the reli­a­bil­ity of one’s own mind.

Offi­cial movie site: www.benjaminbutton.com

Buy the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.