movies – Page 4

Ready for my WGA card

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. To my great surprise, I was entertained throughout! I expected it to suck badly, and now, in the cold light of day and outside the excitement of actually watching the film, I agree with the many substantive screenwriting complaints that Mystery Man is collecting on his website. (Warning: spoilers galore on that site.) I think what happened is that The Phantom Menace (et al.) set the bar so low for George Lucas movies, and Firewall (et al.) set it so low for Harrison Ford movies, that with Steven Spielberg’s countervailing, still-pretty-good filmmaking sense, the new movie vaulted those bars easily.

Of course I already knew from the trailer that the film alludes to the 1947 Roswell UFO incident, just as my own speculative Indy IV story did more than a year ago — but I had a tiny moment of amazement when Indiana Jones actually uttered the word “Etruscan,” which also figures in my story. What are the odds? And where’s my royalty check?

Update 26 May: Mystery Man has a new post up that comprehensively itemizes the serious flaws in the Indy IV script. I agree with almost all of it, and like commenter Kevin Lehane I like the movie less the more I think about it.

Indiana Jones and the Musical Gimmick

[This post is participating in Cerebral Mastication’s Indiana Jones blog-a-thon.]

Speaking of subtle filmmaking techniques…

The rousing musical score that John Williams wrote for Raiders of the Lost Ark included several melodic themes: two for Indiana Jones and one for Marion, a motif for the German army, and of course a theme for the lost ark itself, suitably spooky. As an avid fan of the film and of John Williams I’ve listened to the score countless times over the past 27 years. But as a musical layman, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I noticed something clever that John Williams seemed to be doing with the Ark Theme.

We hear the Ark Theme for the first time when Indiana Jones shows an illustration of the ark to the Army intelligence men who come to meet him.

As you can perhaps hear in that clip, the melody doesn’t quite resolve; it segues into a few notes’ worth of Indy’s theme (a.k.a. “The Raiders March”). But the Ark’s theme is heard again just a few moments later when Marcus expresses his misgivings about this assignment to Indy.

In this clip, Indy starts out thinking about his old flame — “Suppose she’ll still be with him?” — and Marion’s theme plays for a few bars, but then Marcus tells him, “For nearly three thousand years, man has been searching for the lost ark,” at which point the Ark Theme comes in. But once again it does not resolve, segueing this time into the flying-boat travel montage.

The next time the Ark Theme appears, Indy is in the Map Room. This scene is divided into four sequences, each of which includes a rendition of the Ark Theme, each separated from the others by a cut to Indy’s friend Sallah, who’s waiting for him outside.

In the first Map Room sequence, Indy lowers himself by rope into the room and looks at the miniature city on the floor. The Ark Theme plays almost to completion, but leaves off the final note when cutting to Sallah being harassed by some German soldiers.

Next Indy deciphers some hieroglyphics and checks the position of the sun. The Ark Theme plays barely halfway through this time.

Now Indy affixes the medallion to the Staff of Ra, places the staff in the proper hole, and fervidly awaits the proper alignment of the sun. At last the angle is right and a brilliant beam of light reveals the location of the Well of the Souls! The music reaches a crescendo and a satisfying resolution — but while Indy was waiting for the sunlight to creep across the Map Room floor, the melody modulated into another key. We still have not heard the Ark Theme play from beginning to end!

In the coda to the Map Room scene, Indy snaps the Staff of Ra in two and looks for his rope to climb out, but it’s missing. Sallah drops an improvised replacement into the hole. The Ark Theme peters out on a visual gag: Indy discovering a Nazi flag knotted into his makeshift rope.

In the very next scene, Indy, disguised (poorly) as an Arab, ducks hastily out of sight when some soldiers approach too closely. He enters a tent and discovers, tied to a tent pole, Marion — who he thought had been killed! He’s about to free her when he realizes he can’t without raising an alarm. Marion wonders why he’s not cutting her bonds. He tells her, “I know where the ark is, Marion,” and we hear the Ark Theme again. As he explains and she becomes frantic, the music segues into Marion’s theme.

Next, Indy uses a surveying instrument to convert his Map Room calculations into an actual location for digging. A variation on the Ark Theme plays, still unresolved.

A short time later, Indy arrives at his calculated location with a team of diggers. He clambers up a rise alone, scopes it out, and calls his team over. The first half of the Ark Theme plays three times in slightly different forms, and there’s a crescendo as Indy removes the first shovelful of sand, but it’s still not a resolution of the complete Ark Theme.

We get a few notes of the Ark Theme again (listen closely) as Indy and Sallah heave the stone cover off the chest protecting the ark…

…and then a few more as they lift the ark out of its container…

…and another few when Belloq spots the illicit dig early in the morning (“Colonel, wake your men!”)…

…and then once more as German soldiers converge on Indy’s dig site. Once again the final resolving note is left off.

The next appearance of the Ark Theme comes much later. The main characters are now all on a secret Nazi island submarine base. The Ark Theme accompanies the procession of Belloq, Marion, a lot of Germans, and the ark itself (and secretly Indy too) across the island to the ceremonial altar. It’s interrupted when Indy steps out of hiding and levels a bazooka at the group.

Indy’s bluff is called, and he’s captured and brought to the altar to witness the opening of the ark. Belloq mutters some sacred words in Aramaic, the ark is opened — and the stone tablets are not inside, just a bunch of sand. (Psych!) Disappointment turns to bewilderment, though, as the electrical equipment shorts out and an eerie fog spills out of the ark. Here’s the Ark Theme again. This time, just before it resolves it gives way to a danse-macabre version of itself.

That version also doesn’t resolve. Instead it becomes a staccato nightmare as the power of the ark is unleashed.

Finally, the one and only time in the whole film that the Ark Theme is heard from beginning to end, complete with a melodic resolution in the same key, comes as the ark purifies the island by fire, then seals itself back up.

The long-awaited resolution of the Ark Theme creates a sensation of finality. The music subconsciously reinforces the action on the screen: hearing the melody conclude at last, there can be no question that that’s all we’ll see or hear from the ark. Not even the film’s final scene, in which the ark is packed away in a crate inside a gigantic warehouse, repeats the resolution.

Now let’s see if the new sequel betrays that satisfying sense of finality by “going back to the well,” as it were (the Well of Souls!) and unearthing the ark again.

The colors of Star Wars

[This post is participating in Too Many Projects’ Production Design blog-a-thon.]

As I’ve written before, there were a lot of things that bothered me about The Empire Strikes Back. But I was only thirteen when I saw it, and a diehard Star Wars fan. It took years even to admit I didn’t like it much, and decades to be able to articulate my complaints. But there was one problem with it that I was able to identify immediately in the summer of 1980: the soft, pinkish light in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. It hadn’t looked that way in the original, where the cockpit was shades of grey and fluorescent lighting and harsh shadows.

Had Han Solo had an interior decorator revamp his ship between the two films?

I wondered why the new lighting scheme bothered me so much. It could have been simply that change is painful — after all, the Millennium Falcon was already the coolest spaceship in sci-fi history, and you don’t mess with success. But I felt there must be a more substantive reason, and as I searched for it, I slowly awoke to the importance of production design, and specifically the cleverness of the color palette in the original Star Wars.

In that film, space is black, sprinkled with white stars. Spaceships are off-white and gunmetal grey. Stormtroopers, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia wear white. Darth Vader wears black. The surface and buildings of Tatooine are shades of beige, bleached by the sun. Inside the Death Star: grey walls and floors, grey-uniformed officers, black prison cells.

Everything is stark. There is almost no color in Star Wars — except when lasers are firing, lightsabers are clashing, and spaceships are exploding. Then what might have been only a modestly exciting action sequence is amplified, by contrast with the rest of the film’s chromatic drabness, into literally a dazzling thrill.

In 1939, when The Wizard of Oz shifted abruptly from dreary greys into Technicolor, audiences were exhilarated. Ingeniously, the art directors of Star Wars took that one tremendous sensation, chopped it up into small doses, and meted it out to their audience in electrifying little jolts throughout the entire movie — a strategy that the designers of Empire, with its more liberal and therefore less effective use of color, unwisely chose to forgo.

Whips and change

[This post is participating in Cerebral Mastication’s Indiana Jones blog-a-thon.]

As high school wound down for me in the spring of 1984, my class load was pretty light and I put in more time at my afterschool programming job in the Flatiron district. My occasional wanderings in that neighborhood — running errands, finding lunch, etc. — took me past several wholesale import shops, some with large storefronts displaying selected items from their stock in the window. One day as the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom grew near, I passed one such store and saw something that gave me an idea.

Two years earlier, my friends and I had attended a sneak-preview screening of E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. When the house lights came up at the end, we noted with amusement two manly men seated a couple of rows away, complete with Caterpillar trucking caps, too overcome with emotion to get up and leave the theater right away. “This is going to be huge,” we predicted. And we had an idea.

A few months before that, New York magazine published an article about our school called “The Joyful Elite” (original article). It inspired equal measures of pride and outrage: pride because it said we were some of New York City’s smartest kids, and outrage because it said we acted like we knew it. The school was in an uproar for several days because of it; and so my friends and I capitalized on that. In those pre-Zazzle days we found a novelty printing shop in the Yellow Pages (called “Abat,” which I’ll never forget because of the memorably gruff way the owner answered the phone: “’Lo, Abat”) and ordered a large batch of “Joyful Elite” buttons. When we got them a couple of days later, we carried our supply through the hallways between classes, selling them to students and faculty for two dollars apiece. They sold like hotcakes and we made hundreds of dollars! (A big deal, in high school in the 80’s.)

So when the lights came up after E.T. and we knew it was going to be a hit, we saw a profit-making opportunity. We had Abat print up a batch of “I ♥ E T” buttons and congregated outside a big midtown theater on the film’s opening day. Aware that we were crossing some sort of a line with respect to merchandise licensing, we prepared a story to tell any law-enforcement official who asked that the buttons meant, “I love Edison Tech,” our (made-up) alma mater. Fortunately no law-enforcement official ever required us to test the quality of that lie — perhaps because we sold a grand total of two buttons to exiting moviegoers. Our immediate post-mortem explanation for our failure was that everyone who sees E.T. leaves the theater too verklempt to engage in crass commercialism. On further thought, a button was not much of a way to commemorate the E.T.-viewing experience; but at that time the only tool we had was a hammer (the hammer of printing novelty buttons) and every problem looked like a nail. The excess inventory, a cartonful of “I ♥ E T” buttons, sat in my mom’s apartment for decades. If only we’d had some sort of item to sell that was more subject-matter-appropriate.

Anyway, when I passed that importer’s storefront two years later — with the opening of the first Indiana Jones sequel just a few days away — and my eyes alighted on bagsful of six-foot-long imitation-leather bullwhips for a dollar apiece, I snatched up several dozen.

I brought them with me to the premiere showing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I arrived early enough to be near the head of a line that eventually wound from the box office of the Loews Orpheum (then on 86th Street — where I also lined up early for the premieres of Return of the Jedi the previous year and The Empire Strikes Back three years before that), down the block, and around two corners. I set a big bag of bullwhips on the ground by my feet. When my friends arrived later to hold my place in line, I made periodic forays along the ever-lengthening queue of people to sell my bullwhips for five bucks apiece, and I cleaned up. Many eager purchasers wanted to know why I wasn’t selling fedoras, too. (Answer: I’d thought of that, but they were too expensive.) A cop came and tried to shut me down but I talked him into accepting a free bullwhip instead and he left me alone.

I made hundreds!

Update: I’ll be damned, it looks like Abat still exists.

Creepy dancing

[This post is participating in Ferdy on Films’ Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon.]

Dancing: jubilant, energetic expression of the human experience, or chilling bizarro psychodrama? You be the judge.

Case #1

The South Seas Club is where the Hollywood elite of 1938 go to hobnob and to preen. Struggling actress wannabe Jenny and her ragamuffin boyfriend Cliff have often joked about coming here, and now here she is in the company of top leading man Neville Sinclair. When he leads her to the dance floor, even though the band isn’t playing (“I hear music,” he insists seductively, gazing into her eyes), it’s like a dream come true — or is it? Little does Jenny know that Neville Sinclair is a Nazi spy who’s using her to get to Cliff, who has the rocket pack prototype that the Germans want in order to create an army of flying commandos! But Cliff knows it and is speeding to Jenny’s rescue. We know it too, but that’s not all that makes the scene unnerving — it’s also Jenny’s palpable sense that this unfolding scene is too strangely perfect and too damn easy.

(From The Rocketeer.)

Case #2

What does a psychotic supercriminal do when besieged by an also-somewhat-unbalanced superhero after climbing to the belfry of an improbably tall gothic cathedral? Why, waltz with his pretty (but weirdly limp) hostage while his ineffectual goons eliminate themselves trying to take on the costumed hero one at a time.

(From Batman [1989].)

Case #3

Nothing says “joy of motion” like starving a chubby coed in a dank pit in your cellar while videotaping yourself in drag, dancing naked with your penis hidden between your legs.

(From The Silence of the Lambs.)

[Extra special thanks to sister Suzanne for some excellent suggestions for this post.]

A full crowd scene at the food lines

The very day that I learned Microsoft would be buying Danger, and that I would therefore reap a small windfall, Andrea (not yet having heard the news) proposed the idea of hiring a Beatles cover band to play at Jonah’s Yellow Submarine-themed sixth birthday party. At once I thought of Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, of whom we’re told, via a title card at the end of the film:

Saved Brooke Shields from drowning. Blows reward money hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party.

Andrea had to do a lot of convincing, but once she got me past the mental hurdle of “hire a live rock-and-roll band for a party full of six-year-olds?” it became immediately obvious that it was the right thing to do, and we did it: we blew some of our “reward money” hiring The Sun Kings to play Jonah’s party. And it kicked ass.

The Passenger

Many months ago my co-worker Michael Alyn read this six-word story on my blog:

Identity thief cannot escape stolen identity.

and told me it reminded him of the 1975 Antonioni film The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson. I had never heard of it and I put it on my Netflix queue. I finally watched it just a few days ago.

It was a good movie, though plainly an “art film” requiring a certain kind of engagement by the audience. Most moviegoers today would insist on more backstory to explain the choice of Jack Nicholson’s character to abandon his old, mostly good life on a seeming whim and switch identities with a dead stranger. But it succeeds — especially visually — as a rumination on the idea that no man is an island, no matter how alienated he feels.

However, the famous long tracking shot that is the climax of the film detracts from the viewing experience by conspicuousness of technique. (Spoiler follows.) The camera starts in Nicholson’s hotel room and tracks slowly toward an open door barred by a gate. In the courtyard beyond, various characters can be seen coming and going. There is some indistinct audio and the merest suggestion of what might be happening. All well and good — masterful, actually — but then the camera passes between the bars of the gate and out into the courtyard, pans around to follow some more action, and ends up pointing back into Nicholson’s room from the outside to find him dead.

As a way visually to indicate that Nicholson’s character is at an end, that henceforth his very perspective no longer exists, that we can only contemplate him from without, not from within, the shot is brilliant. But the space between the bars through which the camera passes is clearly too narrow. I cannot view or think about that scene without picturing the camera crew trundling toward the gate and signaling some stagehands the moment the bars go out of frame; the stagehands disassembling the trick gate to allow the camera to pass through; and then the same hands reassembling it and then dashing out of sight before the camera pans back around. The fourth wall is broken — almost literally!

About The Passenger, Michael Alyn told me, “It’s a strange movie; I watched it about 8 or 9 years ago and am not quite sure that I got it. I should probably watch it again and see if it makes any more sense after the second viewing.” I replied, “One strange-movie-requiring-multiple-viewings recommendation deserves another: Primer, the tangliest time-travel movie you’ll ever see.”

You heard it here first

The new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features a crate labeled “Roswell, New Mexico 1947,” a clear allusion to the infamous “UFO incident.”

My own speculative Indy IV story, published almost a year ago, included an oblique Roswell joke (“…he conceals the Falcon in the New Mexico desert… a dramatic near-crash during a test flight in 1947″) — which only increases my certainty that when it comes to screenwriting, I can do it better than (or at least as well as) the pros.

U.S. Department of Mwa Ha Ha

From time to time in the popular science press I see something about generating electricity by placing enormous solar collectors in space and beaming the power as microwaves to special receivers on earth.

One such article, “‘Drilling Up’ — Some Look to Space for Energy,” appeared recently from the Associated Press. It describes a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Defense and the island nation of Palau to demonstrate the feasibility of receiving power from an orbiting satellite. The satellite will collect solar energy during its ninety-minute orbit, storing it up in order to beam it down to a receiver on Palau as it passes overhead. It will send a million watts of power during a five-minute window.

The article touts it as a forward-thinking alternative-energy project that will benefit at first the citizens of Palau and later the world. But nowhere in the article, or indeed in other articles of this ilk, are any red flags raised about placing in the Pentagon’s hands a solar death ray that can incinerate targets from orbit.

Now I don’t wish to impugn the Pentagon’s motives. I am sure their ambitions have everything to do with altruistically improving the standard of living for every person on earth and nothing to do with a lust for high-tech war toys. But if you or I built something that could store up three hundred million joules of energy and then deliver it all in a five-minute burst to any spot on earth, you could forgive the people of the world harboring a little concern.

You’d think that science writers could follow the technological implications of the things they write about. Hell, for this story all they need to do is watch some James Bond.

From Die Another Day

Credits report

[This post is participating in Continuity’s Opening Credits Blog-a-thon.]

I remember some national magazine or other publishing a humorous “interview” with Yoda in the summer of 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back was new and so was Yoda. Yoda answered questions on the topics of the day in his cockeyed syntax. (I remember the piece closing with Yoda asking, “Any more questions, have you?” and the interviewer responding, “Yes: who shot J.R.?“) Among the subjects covered in the interview was Superman the Movie — specifically, its opening credits, in which spectacularly animated names whoosh though interstellar space. Yoda said something like, “Oh yes, flying letter storms. Get them all the time on Dagobah, we do.”

That the article should touch on the opening credits — the credits — of another, unrelated movie more than a year and a half old, at a time when Empire was eclipsing everything else in the pop culture landscape, should give you some idea of the impression that Superman‘s credits made. They nearly upstaged the entire movie that followed, and decades later it’s those credits, set to John Williams’ unabashedly rousing march, that hold up better than most of the rest of the film.

That was almost all I had on the subject of opening credits until I mentioned to my wife Andrea that I would be participating in this blog-a-thon. Andrea, who routinely professes ignorance of and disinterest in film lore, proceeded to rattle off a series of terrific suggestions that I am embarrassed not to have come up with myself. So herewith, a few words on a few more memorable opening credits.

No discussion of memorable opening credits would be complete without mentioning the James Bond series. (Not that I’m aiming for anything like completeness.) The first film, Dr. No, doesn’t count, but it’s interesting in the way it doesn’t count: its credits are jazzy and abstract, which might have set the tone for the whole series if it had begun in the late 50’s rather than in the early 60’s. But Camelot and the Playboy era rode up alongside the James Bond series and the tone became somewhat different. The opening credits for the next film, From Russia With Love, created the template for the rest of the films: an imperfectly seen, mostly unclad beauty writhing athletically on screen. Later films, most of them with their title sequences designed by Maurice Binder (who had done the first two too) had variations on this theme: female silhouettes dancing and multiplying across the screen. When handguns appeared, the formula was complete. The pinnacle must have been The Spy Who Loved Me: Roger Moore and some nude women in silhouette, performing gymnastics on the silhouettes of handguns.

Maurice Binder is long gone, alas, but the latest Bond credits, for Casino Royale, are superb: paying homage to the old formula while modernizing with some (non-obnoxious) computer graphics and a considerably more serious tone emphasizing the consequences of violence (as silhouettes battling Bond disintegrate into heart, diamond, spade, and club symbols) rather than the glamour of girls and guns.

The Pink Panther (1963) had an opening credits sequence so memorable it spawned its own cartoon series — even though the film itself was a live-action farce about a diamond heist, not about an animated, rose-hued feline.

Robert Altman’s The Player opens with credits over a long, complex tracking shot — a single take several minutes long, shot with a single camera following several characters and actions in various locations around a complex set. During this sequence, one character mentions the brilliant tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, making it a self-referential joke with plenty of inside-Hollywood references, which is exactly what the rest of the film delivers, too.

But no opening credits capture in microcosm both the psychology and the structure of the film to follow better than those in Memento. A Polaroid of a dead man fades to white. The movie is running in reverse and the Polaroid is un-developing. As the credits end, the blank film disappears into a camera, the flash bulb pops, a bullet flies back into a gun, and the dead man comes back to life.

The Polaroid has been taken as a memento of a violent deed committed by Leonard Shelby who, because of a head injury, lacks the ability to form new memories. Like the Polaroid-in-reverse, his experiences fade in just a few minutes. His life is defined by Polaroids like these, which he snaps and organizes to keep track of people, places, and events that he can’t remember on his own. The story is told in two tracks: one whose scenes are in black and white and appear in chronological order; and another, intercut with the first, whose scenes are in color and, like the fading Polaroid, appear in reverse.