Dangling Conversations

Posted 31 Mar, 2006 at 13:15 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

July 25th: the Animaniacs on DVD.

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Posted 04 Jan, 2006 at 22:46 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Wow, it's been pretty quiet around these parts of late.

Caught a matinée of The Producers today with my Lovely Former Assistant. (Or Former Lovely Assistant? She's not my assistant anymore, but retains her loveliness.) As we were discussing the film afterwards, she told me that they'd deliberately tried to make it as close to the stage production as they could -- that is, they weren't making a movie of the show so much as packaging up the show onto film, if you follow me.

This shows in a number of ways. The ones that stood out for me were in the lighting choices, since that's something that I know a (very) little bit about; several scenes were lit in a very theatrical way, with no attempt at naturalism. (For instance, in one case a song starts and a totally white room is now lit in blue. Why? Not because of any external events -- the sun hasn't gone down or anything -- but because that's really what the song calls for.) Likewise the choreography, and the costumes, and -- well, and nearly everything. Everything was stylised. This isn't terrifically unusual in live theatre, where everything is stylised to some degree or another and abstract designs are fairly common; it's a little unusual in modern popular film.

Compare and contrast with the movie of Rent that came out a month or so ago. The Rent movie is very much a movie; while still a musical in conception, the producers of the film took full advantage of their medium. So you get Mark singing part of the opening number while cycling through the streets of New York, and it works very well, and it's an effect that would be nearly impossible to achieve on stage. Most of the rest of the staging is changed similarly; you get a lot of moving cameras, a lot of big outdoor scenes, very naturalistic lighting, etc.

Rent is conceived as a movie which happens to be based on a musical; like most movies in mainstream American cinema, it embraces an aesthetic of realism because realism -- concreteness, naturalism -- is something that film adapts to very easily. The Producers is a theatrical musical on film, and rejects bog-standard realism in favour of the theatrical experience of abstraction. (This isn't the only alternative to realism, of course; Sin City creates a different kind of abstraction, melding the comic-book aesthetic of its source with a kind of hyper-realism, and Naked Lunch creates a kind of surrealistic nightmare. But it seems that realism is the default setting for American cinema; to some extent, we even judge animated film based on how close it comes to realism.)

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Posted 18 Oct, 2005 at 17:01 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

John Scalzi's latest book's been released on this continent: The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. Among other things, he gives a list of what he considers to be The Canon: 50 sci-fi must-sees. As such things do, this has transmongrified into a blogthing: bold the ones you've seen.

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Posted 22 Aug, 2005 at 00:21 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Sin City and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: have the following things in common: both of them are entirely digital films; both of them use the digital technology to create a very specific mood and aesthetic; both are self-consciously drawing on past movie styles (noir for Sin City, pulp action for Sky Captain) for a lot of their vision.

So why did I find Sin City compelling, and turned off Sky Captain within the first fifteen minutes the first time I tried watching it?

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