Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Moved
Moving to Wordpress: theconsumption.wordpress.com. I think I just like it more... although I might come back to this someday.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Consumption: Reflections in a Golden Eye
Reflections opens with a quote from novelist Carson McCullers (upon whose book the film is based) stating "There is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder was committed," and spends the rest of its two hours building towards that murder. It's a twist on the whodunnit, in that the motives are established long before the murder is committed; the question is simply which tensions will boil over first. In that regard, it's a fairly fascinating film, pitting well-developed archetypes against one another. There's Brando's general, a man so restrained that he doesn't so much as blink when a car crashes behind him, but whose repressed emotions are getting constantly nearer to the surface. He's contrasted with a soldier who is only comfortable when away from the base, and even then only when both he and his horse are bareback. Taylor as Brando's wife is promiscuous, flirtacious and free-spirited, the opposite of her stodgy husband; she's having an affair with another general whose wife is both neurotic and depressed, but somehow seems the most sane of the bunch. Or she would, if not for the influence of her effeminate Phillipino caregiver.
While that last one threatens to (and often does) border on camp, the setup would be easier to appreciate without Toshiro Mayuzumi's painfully overbearing score, which wrings every bit of tension it can out of scenes that would have more than enough atmosphere on their own. The last shot of the film also crosses the line into self-parody, which is a shame, because with just a little more restraint, it could have been an absolutely mesmerizing last image. It's easy to imagine the film's erotic elements (which include themes of voyeurism, domination and closeted sexuality) getting beefed up in a modern adaptation, and there are certainly the elements of a great film in the framework, but it feels like the work of a director trying to find his way into the (then-)new American cinema, and not quite succeeding.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Transcript: John Hillcoat interview, The Road
I guess it's a good enough time to publish the rest of my interview with The Road director John Hillcoat. I had the good fortune to speak with him back in September at the Toronto film fest, which led to a cover feature in Fast Forward in November, but here's the raw transcript, where Mr. Hillcoat talks about the film's optimism, the trickier aspects of adaptation and why he wanted to avoid looking like Mad Max.
Had you read the book before you were approached to do the film?
I actually got the unpublished manuscript – that’s how it started. I don’ think I would have actually been able to make this film if I didn’t get it unpublished , because once it went on to the Pulitzer prize, I’m sure there would have been half a dozen other people on top of it. So I was very lucky in that sense.
I mean, Blood Meridian was a big influence on The Proposition, my last film, but yeah, it just, when I got the manuscript, it had a huge impact on me.
What was it that connected with you?
It was just the emotional love story. It was so poignant and heart-breaking. It had quite an impact.
Some people talk about it as being a very cinematic book, because of the setting. But plot-wise, there’s huge stretches of just hunger and foraging.
Which you can get away with in a novel. Novels have a different rhythm. You can’t get away with that kind of repetition in film.
Were you at all apprehensive about mapping that atmosphere to a film?
I was also, the idea of just two people on a journey that are in every scene — you’re just with a father and son from beginning to end, so that was a bit of a mental leap, how that was going to work cinematically and how you could keep that emotionally alive. In a book, you can go any place and it’s all in your head, and there’s the poetry of the language. It’s a different medium. But when you physicalize with film, you make it a physical... you become like this witness to... actual people embody those characters, and you witness them and under closer inspection in a way. It’s more laid bare, strangely.
In the book, there’s a great deal of ambiguity regarding both the origin of the Apocalypse and the background of the characters. How much of that did you fill in for yourself during the filming?
I found that one of the most simple and refreshing things about it, because when I heard — I love McCarthy’s work, but when I heard, when Nick Wexler, the producer, said I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished, I got really excited. And then when he said “It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,” my heart actually sank, because, for me, apocalyptic genre has got such a pre-conceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head. And one of the things that it did, which was quite ingenious and made it immediately authentic and placed you in the here and now and put the spotlight on the human relationship was simply not making a film all about the event. Because then I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much about what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters. It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride that you don’t even have a human connection to it, in a way. It’s more like a fantasy film.
I take it you didn’t look to other post-apocalyptic films for inspiration?
Well, I ended up actually looking at films like The Bicycle Thieves, which is a father-and-son relationship thing where they’re really under pressure, and how did they behave as human beings. That kind of thing. And Grapes of Wrath came to mind. So it’s actually, and it also seemed really familiar, the world, the simple thing of a shopping cart with all your possessions, you know, that is the homeless living in every city. So, it just had a much more real kind of grounding, and it was more about America now and the world now than the future. I know that sounds a bit strange.
Some of the filming took place in New Orleans, Mt. St. Helens, some of the most devastated areas you could find. How did it affect the emotions to do the filming in that kind of environment?
Well, that made it more poignant and it also helped, particularly Viggo and Kodi, it really helped them really feel and absorb that extreme pressure and tap into that world. We act off it like you’d react off of another character, or another person, I mean. And I think for actors, that really helped. It made the whole crew, including all the cast, it gave it a poignancy that I think was a really positive force.
Specifically in New Orleans, timing-wise, how close was that to the actual hurricane?
Well, there’s even, we were lucky to find, I tracked down 70mm IMAX footage that was shot two days after Katrina hit. And there’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real. The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour, but the actual objects and everything in that frame is – other than those things I mentioned – is real. And then the shopping mall, the abandoned shopping mall, and there were several scenes where the only thing really was the sky, and we had to cut out some of the traffic and things like that in the background. So, in other words, it was still in the process of clean-up, so it ranged between late last year and 2 days after.
I remember seeing the shot of the ships and wondering how they could possibly have ended up on top of a road.
See, that’s the thing. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. But I think there was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples; otherwise it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of. It’s too alienating. It’s like just a videogame, in a way, with all that CGI.
Plus, the tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic films isn’t exactly...
At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film, it was an adventure film. It was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. There were actually elements that — in the book, there was an army of people in chains, including slaves and masks, and boiler suits, and that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well, so... And I was pleased to find out that a lot of people who have read the book felt [the film] was similar to the kinds of images they had go through their head.
The Man is pretty far removed from the typical movie hero ‑ he’s constantly considering killing his own child, for one thing, even if it is for valid reasons. Is it hard to take a character like that and make them sympathetic on the screen?
I think the key is, I mean, Viggo was really emotionally throws himself into this stuff, and I think the key is to understand the pressures that he’s in. Actually, it’s the kid that teaches the man. As the man, we all... I think fear is a big part of our world, there’s a lot of fear out there at the moment, and I think it shuts off doors, and that’s what we witness is, under pressure, people start to shut down and their moral compass can start to sway. And we see that, but I think because we see it as a gradual thing, I think it’s a way of understanding why he’s doing that. In a way, if you put yourself in his shoes, which I think happens, then you can accept it. But the boy is, you know, it’s a love story and he really is doing it out of love. He’s doing it with the best intentions, and I think that’s the difference. And admittedly, that starts to be counter-productive, but then he learns from the boy. The boy picks him up on that, and the boy is the one who takes the leap of faith that I think liberates the fear, and to me, that’s the moral of the parable and the tale, is that what makes us human is very delicate and very special, and we have to cling on to that. And sometimes that means taking a leap of faith.
Do you see it as an optimistic film?
Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing that, it’s a little bit frustrating because I just think it’s so emotionally clear, but people get distracted by the literalness of the apocalypse, and it is a projection of our worst fears as parents and as humans, facing a potential ending, and then how does one generation move on to another? And really, that’s what it is. For Cormack, he said it’s a book about human goodness. It was very personal, it was dedicated to his own son, and in that sense, it’s incredibly — I looked at a lot of father-son films, and was amazed at how many are tyrannical or absent or dysfunctional, and so I think in this way, it’s a very positive... and it’s really about what we take for granted. It’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of. The fact that the man learns from the boy, in a way is saved, emotionally, or you can see that as spiritual, any way that you want to read it, the point is, there is a shift. And that shift is extremely hopeful — and actually the essence of what hope is, I think.
It isn’t until they embrace hope that they can stop being two isolated people and join with others.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that Cormack is so unflinching in his examination of how people behave, and I think that’s why it’s so poignant, and it really makes you think because it’s so adept at showing that. To me it was a beautiful love story, and same to Viggo and the boy, Kodi, and everyone involved, actually. We all saw that, and we always tried to protect that as well, because you could get overwhelmed. If you put in too much stuff, the other stuff, then the balance is shaken.
One scene in the book that didn’t make it into the film that surprised me is the one where The Man finds the apple husks. To me, the enourmity of that small victory really captured the characters’ lot. How do you decide which scenes make it in and which don’t?
To me, the Coca-Cola scene was like that, and finding the bunker was even more so, and the insects that they found, that little bit of munching — we tried to get a balance. We actually filmed that, the apple...
There’s also, the most controversial scene of the book [baby-eating], we found the world was so defined by that point that it was like over-doing it. It was too much, because it was physical and real, it was just too much, like we were trying too hard, almost.
The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormack himself loved it, and when he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book, for him. Apart from four lines that were very special that we did film, and that we did put back in. All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
Which four lines?
When the boy simply says ‘What would you do if I died,’ and the father says ‘I’d want to die, too.’ ‘So you could be with me?’ ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ So it’s just this beautiful exchange that actually mirrors what’s to come... Foreshadows as a mirroring. And it’s a beautiful kind of thing to say.
All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
I actually got the unpublished manuscript – that’s how it started. I don’ think I would have actually been able to make this film if I didn’t get it unpublished , because once it went on to the Pulitzer prize, I’m sure there would have been half a dozen other people on top of it. So I was very lucky in that sense.
I mean, Blood Meridian was a big influence on The Proposition, my last film, but yeah, it just, when I got the manuscript, it had a huge impact on me.
What was it that connected with you?
It was just the emotional love story. It was so poignant and heart-breaking. It had quite an impact.
Some people talk about it as being a very cinematic book, because of the setting. But plot-wise, there’s huge stretches of just hunger and foraging.
Which you can get away with in a novel. Novels have a different rhythm. You can’t get away with that kind of repetition in film.
Were you at all apprehensive about mapping that atmosphere to a film?
I was also, the idea of just two people on a journey that are in every scene — you’re just with a father and son from beginning to end, so that was a bit of a mental leap, how that was going to work cinematically and how you could keep that emotionally alive. In a book, you can go any place and it’s all in your head, and there’s the poetry of the language. It’s a different medium. But when you physicalize with film, you make it a physical... you become like this witness to... actual people embody those characters, and you witness them and under closer inspection in a way. It’s more laid bare, strangely.
In the book, there’s a great deal of ambiguity regarding both the origin of the Apocalypse and the background of the characters. How much of that did you fill in for yourself during the filming?
I found that one of the most simple and refreshing things about it, because when I heard — I love McCarthy’s work, but when I heard, when Nick Wexler, the producer, said I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished, I got really excited. And then when he said “It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,” my heart actually sank, because, for me, apocalyptic genre has got such a pre-conceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head. And one of the things that it did, which was quite ingenious and made it immediately authentic and placed you in the here and now and put the spotlight on the human relationship was simply not making a film all about the event. Because then I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much about what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters. It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride that you don’t even have a human connection to it, in a way. It’s more like a fantasy film.
I take it you didn’t look to other post-apocalyptic films for inspiration?
Well, I ended up actually looking at films like The Bicycle Thieves, which is a father-and-son relationship thing where they’re really under pressure, and how did they behave as human beings. That kind of thing. And Grapes of Wrath came to mind. So it’s actually, and it also seemed really familiar, the world, the simple thing of a shopping cart with all your possessions, you know, that is the homeless living in every city. So, it just had a much more real kind of grounding, and it was more about America now and the world now than the future. I know that sounds a bit strange.
Some of the filming took place in New Orleans, Mt. St. Helens, some of the most devastated areas you could find. How did it affect the emotions to do the filming in that kind of environment?
Well, that made it more poignant and it also helped, particularly Viggo and Kodi, it really helped them really feel and absorb that extreme pressure and tap into that world. We act off it like you’d react off of another character, or another person, I mean. And I think for actors, that really helped. It made the whole crew, including all the cast, it gave it a poignancy that I think was a really positive force.
Specifically in New Orleans, timing-wise, how close was that to the actual hurricane?
Well, there’s even, we were lucky to find, I tracked down 70mm IMAX footage that was shot two days after Katrina hit. And there’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real. The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour, but the actual objects and everything in that frame is – other than those things I mentioned – is real. And then the shopping mall, the abandoned shopping mall, and there were several scenes where the only thing really was the sky, and we had to cut out some of the traffic and things like that in the background. So, in other words, it was still in the process of clean-up, so it ranged between late last year and 2 days after.
I remember seeing the shot of the ships and wondering how they could possibly have ended up on top of a road.
See, that’s the thing. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. But I think there was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples; otherwise it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of. It’s too alienating. It’s like just a videogame, in a way, with all that CGI.
Plus, the tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic films isn’t exactly...
At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film, it was an adventure film. It was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. There were actually elements that — in the book, there was an army of people in chains, including slaves and masks, and boiler suits, and that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well, so... And I was pleased to find out that a lot of people who have read the book felt [the film] was similar to the kinds of images they had go through their head.
The Man is pretty far removed from the typical movie hero ‑ he’s constantly considering killing his own child, for one thing, even if it is for valid reasons. Is it hard to take a character like that and make them sympathetic on the screen?
I think the key is, I mean, Viggo was really emotionally throws himself into this stuff, and I think the key is to understand the pressures that he’s in. Actually, it’s the kid that teaches the man. As the man, we all... I think fear is a big part of our world, there’s a lot of fear out there at the moment, and I think it shuts off doors, and that’s what we witness is, under pressure, people start to shut down and their moral compass can start to sway. And we see that, but I think because we see it as a gradual thing, I think it’s a way of understanding why he’s doing that. In a way, if you put yourself in his shoes, which I think happens, then you can accept it. But the boy is, you know, it’s a love story and he really is doing it out of love. He’s doing it with the best intentions, and I think that’s the difference. And admittedly, that starts to be counter-productive, but then he learns from the boy. The boy picks him up on that, and the boy is the one who takes the leap of faith that I think liberates the fear, and to me, that’s the moral of the parable and the tale, is that what makes us human is very delicate and very special, and we have to cling on to that. And sometimes that means taking a leap of faith.
Do you see it as an optimistic film?
Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing that, it’s a little bit frustrating because I just think it’s so emotionally clear, but people get distracted by the literalness of the apocalypse, and it is a projection of our worst fears as parents and as humans, facing a potential ending, and then how does one generation move on to another? And really, that’s what it is. For Cormack, he said it’s a book about human goodness. It was very personal, it was dedicated to his own son, and in that sense, it’s incredibly — I looked at a lot of father-son films, and was amazed at how many are tyrannical or absent or dysfunctional, and so I think in this way, it’s a very positive... and it’s really about what we take for granted. It’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of. The fact that the man learns from the boy, in a way is saved, emotionally, or you can see that as spiritual, any way that you want to read it, the point is, there is a shift. And that shift is extremely hopeful — and actually the essence of what hope is, I think.
It isn’t until they embrace hope that they can stop being two isolated people and join with others.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that Cormack is so unflinching in his examination of how people behave, and I think that’s why it’s so poignant, and it really makes you think because it’s so adept at showing that. To me it was a beautiful love story, and same to Viggo and the boy, Kodi, and everyone involved, actually. We all saw that, and we always tried to protect that as well, because you could get overwhelmed. If you put in too much stuff, the other stuff, then the balance is shaken.
One scene in the book that didn’t make it into the film that surprised me is the one where The Man finds the apple husks. To me, the enourmity of that small victory really captured the characters’ lot. How do you decide which scenes make it in and which don’t?
To me, the Coca-Cola scene was like that, and finding the bunker was even more so, and the insects that they found, that little bit of munching — we tried to get a balance. We actually filmed that, the apple...
There’s also, the most controversial scene of the book [baby-eating], we found the world was so defined by that point that it was like over-doing it. It was too much, because it was physical and real, it was just too much, like we were trying too hard, almost.
The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormack himself loved it, and when he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book, for him. Apart from four lines that were very special that we did film, and that we did put back in. All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
Which four lines?
When the boy simply says ‘What would you do if I died,’ and the father says ‘I’d want to die, too.’ ‘So you could be with me?’ ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ So it’s just this beautiful exchange that actually mirrors what’s to come... Foreshadows as a mirroring. And it’s a beautiful kind of thing to say.
All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
The Consumption: December 12
December has been conspiring against me. Illness, funerals and car-related frustrations have abounded, but I'm currently rebounding, and set to continue my quest to document all the media I consume. All I need now is willpower.
PS: Coming next week -- a full transcription of my interview with Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus director Terry Gilliam. Good times.
FILM: Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog: Somehow, despite my fondness for free things, Joss Whedon and musicals, I missed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog the first time around. I've liked it in principle, at least, for quite a while now -- the idea that talented people could put a project together as a lark when a strike kept them from doing anything on a bigger scale, well, that seems like something that should happen more often. Imagine if Terry Gilliam experimented with backyard movies between his quixotic alternate-reality blockbusters, or if the Coens and Sam Raimi pieced together bloody marvels to work through their writer's block. But the worry was that liking Dr. Horrible in principle would be easier than practice. Despite the pedigree, it has all the hallmarks of a particularly cutesy vanity project.
So, colour me impressed. Sure, Neil Patrick Harris's voice is a touch reedy, and Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer costume is possibly too cheap for even such an on-the-fly production, but the thing still fires on all cylinders, to use an entirely inappropriate cliche. Harris's cutesiness is actually an advantage, as it's the fulcrum on which the entire ending pivots (to belabour things further); if he were at all sinister, there'd be no shock in seeing him become a genuine, remorseless villain. Light-hearted songs, a bummer of an ending and a solid twist on the villian origin story -- not a bad way to spend your time off.
FILM: Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut): A mostly dirt-free but nonetheless informative look behind the scenes at the Python crew. The five-part doc methodically chronicles the group's origins and influences before moving on to the TV series and films, although it shies away from any "where are they now" treatment of the members' post-Python careers. The surviving Pythons are both candid and friendly in their description of events -- they admit to disagreements and pay the occasional backhanded compliment, but there's no real bitterness to be found. For something as absurd and silly as Python, any sort of rational doc would seem to at least somewhat miss the point, but Lawyer's Cut does a more-than-efficient job of telling its story.
PS: Coming next week -- a full transcription of my interview with Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus director Terry Gilliam. Good times.
FILM: Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog: Somehow, despite my fondness for free things, Joss Whedon and musicals, I missed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog the first time around. I've liked it in principle, at least, for quite a while now -- the idea that talented people could put a project together as a lark when a strike kept them from doing anything on a bigger scale, well, that seems like something that should happen more often. Imagine if Terry Gilliam experimented with backyard movies between his quixotic alternate-reality blockbusters, or if the Coens and Sam Raimi pieced together bloody marvels to work through their writer's block. But the worry was that liking Dr. Horrible in principle would be easier than practice. Despite the pedigree, it has all the hallmarks of a particularly cutesy vanity project.
So, colour me impressed. Sure, Neil Patrick Harris's voice is a touch reedy, and Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer costume is possibly too cheap for even such an on-the-fly production, but the thing still fires on all cylinders, to use an entirely inappropriate cliche. Harris's cutesiness is actually an advantage, as it's the fulcrum on which the entire ending pivots (to belabour things further); if he were at all sinister, there'd be no shock in seeing him become a genuine, remorseless villain. Light-hearted songs, a bummer of an ending and a solid twist on the villian origin story -- not a bad way to spend your time off.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Catching up: More consumption
Personal life made it tricky to post in the last week or so, so here's a bit of catch-up:
CONCERT: Billy Bragg with Ron Hawkins and Kris Demeanor at Jack Singer: Uptown (Winnipeg's alt.weekly) called Ron Hawkins one of the most underappreciated singer-songwriters in Canada, and if his opening set's any indication, chalk me up as one of the underappreciators. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with his straightforward folk songs, but there wasn't much to make you catch notice, either.
Demeanor, on the other hand, knows how to make the most of his single-guitar set-up. As good as he is when his Crack Band is around, his solo sets are something else altogether, crackling with energy and integrating the best parts of beat poetry and singer-songwriter tradition without settling into a coffee-house rut. "Practice" (about a string of near-non-existent international relationships) was a highlight, but "I Have Seen the Future" is still the showstopper. (Check out the award-winning animated short video for that below).
What can you say about Bragg? He brought a polished show, talking to the crowd at length about everything from American football (or "runny runny catchy," as he calls it) to the benefits of Rock Band on a new generation of music fans to the Mermaid Avenue project (whose Woody Guthrie tunes were a highlight of the set). Some nice touches: When he switched to acoustic, Bragg told the crowd that "now's the time to call me Judas," and the guitar itself had "This machine kills time" stenciled on it, a clevernod to Guthrie. By the time his set neared the two-hour mark, the banter seemed a bit much and the tunes dragged a bit, but the rousing rendition of "There is Power in a Union" was a perfect end to the set proper, even if the crowd steadfastly refused to sing or clap along.
FILM: The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Reviews of movies like this often get bogged in the question of "How will this play to kids?" Put simply, I don't care. Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl's story is so consistent with the director's other work that adults could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie's being marketed to 12-year-olds. The concessions to younger viewers (say, replacing all swear words with "cuss") could just be considered quirks on par with The Life Aquatic's Portuguese Bowie soundtrack, and while the setting and animation are plenty vibrant, the voicework (featuring Anderson's usual roster -- Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, etc, plus a note-perfect George Clooney) contains plenty of Anderson's usual deadpan melancholy. In other words, it's really just a more fantastical extension of Royal Tennenbaums and Rushmore which, if it doesn't exactly speak to the director's diversity, certainly speaks to his singular style.
FILM: In the Loop: This British film is supposedly a comedy, but while it is hilarious from start to finish, in practice it plays more like a tragedy. There's certainly very little silly about it, and despite a mood that sometimes seems borrowed from deadpan British exports like The Office, it's also not an awkwardness-comedy. Instead, it's a deeply cynical satire on the political process, a film about the origins of war that places the blame more on petty egos and offhanded rhetoric than on overarching conspiracies or evil megalomaniacs. There are plenty of loudmouthed bullies, snivelling sycophants and ambitious fools to go around, but the atmosphere feels like high school politics with calamitous stakes. The one thing it does share with The Office, though, is that it's far from a feel-good comedy -- you'll laugh, but leave the film praying (and doubting) that its portrayal of backroom dealings is exaggerated.
FILM: Zelig: Woody Allen's one-per-year approach to filmmaking hasn't led to quite as many stylistic oddities as you might expect, but Zelig is one of the exceptions. Presented as a newsreel documentary examining a great but forgotten personality of the 20s and 30s, the film is a lighthearted detour that travels some of the same ground as Forrest Gump without the schmaltz. Zelig's title character (played by Allen) is an absolute nobody, a personality so meek that he copes by blending in perfectly with whoever is around him -- even to the point of physically transforming, which leads to shots of Allen in blackface and other racial garb that would be offensive if it weren't just silly. He's eventually treated by a psychiatrist (Mia Farrow, in one of her first collaborations with Allen) and taught to integrate into modern society. As the film is heavy on narration, the performances are all slight -- there's simply not enough screen time given to the characters to allow for any depth. Instead, Allen relies on a whimsical story and then-impressive special effects integrating Allen into some key historical scenes. It's a fun, interesting oddity from the director, but he was wise to keep it under the 80-minute mark, as it already starts to wear thin by the end.
BOOK: Worlds of Power: Ninja Gaiden: When I was in elementary school, I had two books in a thoroughly ridiculous series of novelizations based on N.E.S. games. Early this year, I had an idea for a project: Collect the rest (or get them from the library, at least) and do a series of blog posts reviewing each one. The inter-library loans have been slow in coming, so a year later, Ninja Gaiden is only the second I've read (after the side-scrolling Blaster Master adaptation). Both books (which are written under the amazing pen name F.X. Nine) are perfectly awful examples of kid-lit, but where Blaster Master took great pains to explain how video game oddities like health powerups could exist in its world, Ninja Gaiden is content to overwhelm its readers with the sheer awesomeness of being a capital-N Ninja. Expanding the storyline beyond the usual N.E.S. formula of "run to the right and kill things" leads to a bizarre plot involving an orphaned 16-year-old Ninja, an ancient conspiracy, CIA double-crosses and a sub-plot that verges on establishing a love interest without ever getting into that icky kissing stuff, but the highlight of both books has got to be the apologetic 'If you liked this, you might like...' tacked onto the end, which spotlights genuine adventure and science fiction classics. You get the sense that F.X. Nine is secretly hoping to help kids realize his books are bunk, but the powers that be won't let him flat-out say it.
BOOK: Monster, 1959: The trouble with trying to satirize an era half-a-century after the fact is that what would have once been timely references now feel like knowing nudges. David Maine's Monster, 1959 is heavily inspired by creature fare like King Kong, Godzilla and their more ridiculous (and largely forgotten) ilk, with the novel twist of being written largely from the perspective of the book's creature, K., a giant lizard-ape-butterfly-thing kidnapped from its island home to be put on display in America. While the attempts to understand a beast that hardly even possesses the capacity for thought leads to some interesting passages, the references to political events, actors and films feel shoe-horned in rather than natural, and the message that even the heros in squeaky-clean B-flicks probably had less than squeaky-clean lives is a bit ham-handed. As an action-adventure, it's a good yarn, but as political commentary, it's like a more-forced Tom Robbins without the absurdist humour.
Demeanor, on the other hand, knows how to make the most of his single-guitar set-up. As good as he is when his Crack Band is around, his solo sets are something else altogether, crackling with energy and integrating the best parts of beat poetry and singer-songwriter tradition without settling into a coffee-house rut. "Practice" (about a string of near-non-existent international relationships) was a highlight, but "I Have Seen the Future" is still the showstopper. (Check out the award-winning animated short video for that below).
What can you say about Bragg? He brought a polished show, talking to the crowd at length about everything from American football (or "runny runny catchy," as he calls it) to the benefits of Rock Band on a new generation of music fans to the Mermaid Avenue project (whose Woody Guthrie tunes were a highlight of the set). Some nice touches: When he switched to acoustic, Bragg told the crowd that "now's the time to call me Judas," and the guitar itself had "This machine kills time" stenciled on it, a clevernod to Guthrie. By the time his set neared the two-hour mark, the banter seemed a bit much and the tunes dragged a bit, but the rousing rendition of "There is Power in a Union" was a perfect end to the set proper, even if the crowd steadfastly refused to sing or clap along.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Desolation Road -- Interview with John Hillcoat + post-apocalypse sidebar
Even within the pantheon of post-apocalyptic fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is bleak. The book’s heroes are an unnamed father and son, both perpetually verging on death in an inhospitable America. An unexplained disaster has drained the colour from the sky and left a coating of ash over the ground, transforming the landscape into greyscale. Derelict buildings and lifeless forests serve as pale reminders of the way things used to be. The book’s villain is not some contrived cult or band of malevolent mutants, but hunger and the lengths to which men will go to stave off starvation.
Even McCarthy’s prose is stripped of any embellishment. Entire pages pass without an unnecessary flourish, not even so much as a comma. The starkness of the language seems essential to the story, bringing a poetry to long stretches that consist of little more than hunger and endless hiking. How the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 is obvious; still, it doesn’t seem like obvious fodder for multiplexes.
Although the Coen brothers have proven that McCarthy’s books could succeed both critically and commercially with their Oscar-winning adaptation of No Country for Old Men, it’s understandable that director John Hillcoat had trepidations about filming The Road. Even beyond capturing the author’s singular voice, there was the issue of doing something new in a post-apocalyptic world, a genre with well-established trappings.
“When [The Road’s producer] Nick Wexler said, ‘I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished,’ I got really excited,” Hillcoat recalls. “Then when he said, ‘It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,’ my heart actually sank, because, for me, the apocalyptic genre has got such a preconceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head.”
As Hillcoat explains, McCarthy’s decision to skip over the actual apocalyptic event kept the book from bogging down in genre conventions. The Road, both in film and book form, is concerned with the human aftermath, not big explosions and the end of the world.
“I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters,” he explains. “It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride, that you don’t even have a human connection to it. It’s more like a fantasy film.”
Hillcoat’s film is no roller-coaster, but it is a spectacle in its own way. The director realized that without McCarthy’s language to carry the story, the weight of the film would fall on the visuals. Rather than rely on computer wizardry to create the devastated landscapes that Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee wander through, Hillcoat chose to film in real-world locations that had undergone their own small-scale apocalypses. Coal fields and a burnt-down amusement park in Pennsylvania and the slopes of Mount St. Helens required only minor digital tweaking to suit the director’s vision, and one of the film’s most impressive shots came from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“There’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real,” Hillcoat says. “The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour. But the actual objects and everything in that frame is real. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. There was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples. Otherwise, it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of.”
The director’s aversion to post-apocalyptic fiction likely stems from the genre’s ties to Australia. Though he spent his childhood in Hamilton, Ont., Hillcoat was born in Queensland, Australia, and he has directed three feature-length films in his home country, including the Nick Cave-scripted western The Proposition. It’s only natural that the director wanted to distance himself from the conventions of a genre that was codified three decades ago by his countryman George Miller in the muscle-car-and-studded-leather classic Mad Max.
“At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film,” Hillcoat says. “It was an adventure film — it was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. In [McCarthy’s] book, there was an army of people with chains, including slaves and masks and boiler suits that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well.”
For inspiration, Hillcoat instead turned to films like John Ford’s dust-bowl parable The Grapes of Wrath and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, set in post-Second World War Italy. While neither film’s setting is quite as dramatic as The Road’s wasteland, their focus on family relationships is closer to the heart of McCarthy’s novel than any adventure story could be.
“For Cormac, he said it’s a book about human goodness,” the director recalls. “It’s really about what we take for granted — it’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of.”
“The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormac himself loved it,” he continues. “When he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book for him.... He felt we picked the essence.”
CINEMATIC WASTELAND
John Hillcoat may want to distance himself from the big screen’s post-apocalyptic tradition, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Here’s a brief introduction to some classic (and not-so-classic) cinematic wastelands.
On the Beach (1959) — Even in the ’50s, Armageddon always seems to happen in Australia. In this adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins face the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Planet of the Apes (1968) — Even with the cheesy costumes and Charlton Heston’s teeth-gritting overacting, the original is still worlds better than Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.
A Boy and His Dog (1975) —One of the strangest post-apocalyptic films out there stars a young Don Johnson and his telepathic dog, and the plot revolves around an underground sect that wants the virile Johnson to impregnate their women.
Mad Max (1979) — Before The Passion of the Christ, before the buddy-cop comedies, even before the sex symbol status, Mel Gibson was Max, just a humble cop avenging his family’s murder. Followed by The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, with a fourth film rumoured for a 2011 release.
The Quiet Earth (1985) — Zac Hobson awakens to find that the rest of the world has disappeared. One of the better last-man-on-Earth movies out there (see also: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007), all based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend).
Doomsday (2008) — After a deadly virus forces the entirety of Scotland to be quarantined, the populace quickly embraces feudalism and cannibalism. Blatantly rips off everything from Mad Max to Escape from New York and Aliens, and has a lot of trashy fun in the process.
Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom Live review
Official review ended up a touch more positive than the first impression...
Though it dips back as far as 1985’s Rain Dogs (and the live performances it draws from went even further), Glitter and Doom mostly spotlights Waits’s post-Big Time catalogue. The set list, cherry-picked from performances throughout Waits’s 2008 tour, wanders through nearly every album the singer has released in the last two decades, even the soundtrack to The Black Rider, Waits’s collaboration with William Burroughs.
Waits is in full-on bluster mode for much of Glitter. Fortunately, his bellowing doesn’t overwhelm the songs — “Dirt in the Ground” is just as effective with Waits using his lower register instead of Bone Machine’s strained falsetto — but the cumulative effect can be more overwhelming than his albums, which pluck an impressive variety of moods from his torn vocal cords. It might’ve helped if the half-hour of stage banter that’s been confined to a second disc had instead been spread throughout the performance (though Waits’s wandering stories and shuck-and-jive routines are plenty entertaining on their own). Newcomers looking for an overview of everything Waits is capable of might be better served by 2006’s sprawling Orphans, but for hardcore Waits fans, the showmanship on Glitter and Doom is pure manna.
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