The Shining : Looking At One Image

a

This is one of the last shots of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. This is the (driven) mad father whose attempt to kill his family has been thwarted.

The devil's hell has frozen over.

He is frozen in an expression of inhuman rage. A pure emotion, a state.

It is an uncanny and horrifying end to those uncanny and horrifying last days. It is pathetic and blood-curdling. Even though he is gone and seemingly no longer a threat, it is uncomfortable to look at him. He is a beast.

It is humorous too. This is a cartoon villain like the ones with whom he is associated, and who he associates himself with, in the film - Wile E Coyote* or the Big Bad Wolf** - who are never able to catch their prey or satisfy their hungers.

This is an extreme image of the frustrations of an artist paralysed by writer's block.


His eyes are rolled up in death but also as if the awful flame of his ardours have been doused with refreshing cool - he almost looks ecstatic, his mouth slightly open (aaah!)

He is stuck in the ground like a tombstone to himself, an epitaph of insanity written on his face. There is no need for anything beyond "here lies".

Time is frozen. He is the so-called "caretaker" who has somehow been here before. He is being preserved. He is a tombstone to a type of man, perhaps.

There is something monumental here, something larger than life.

Will he come again; will he thaw? The danger is still alive. What is frozen implies life and movement before. Will he, it, move again when spring comes? The ground is angling downwards but it hasn't taken him all the way down into hell/the earth.


* Earlier we saw Danny watching a Road Runner cartoon and we can hear the lyrics "the coyote's after you... when he catches you, you're through."

** When he is standing outside the bathroom with an axe he takes on the role of the wolf "little pigs little pigs let me come in...then I'll huff and I'll puff".

Wile E. Coyote cemented solid in Going Going Gosh!, 
a victim once again of his own trap

Movie Morality Blogathon : 6 - 14 March

.
Because I think it would be fun, I propose a stock-take of everything that has to do with ethics and morality in modern film.

As long as it has a moral dimension you can write about whatever concerns you, interests you, gives you hope, no matter how big the pressing issue or how small the pet peeve. Hopefully this can get people thinking and create various debates.

Once you have a piece ready you can leave a link to it in the comments section at the bottom of this post or send me the link by email at srgfilmstuff@hotmail.co.uk. Alternatively (if you don't have a blog, for example) you can send me the full piece and I can post it on the site in its entirety.

Here are just a few of the subjects you could tackle:

The responsibility of film-makers towards us; our responsibility towards a film as viewers; relationships (sexual and otherwise); censorship; the ratings systems; normalising and glamourising; shock value; torture porn; where a film might be immoral or moral; the rating system; what is being shown to children; profanity; dealing with real historical events and people; piracy; what we do with old films and how the moral rules of engagement have changed over the decades...


The blogathon will run from the 6th to the 14th of March.

Thank you.

Helicopters

an 

Annoying little insect* hovering haughtily above. Spying on us, sniping at us.

Light it up like a firework and bring it down to earth.

What knavery is this to deny us explosion by cutting away before the deed is done (I Am Legend) or worse leave a crumpled heap of metal, dry and unexploded?

If you want a picture of the future of cinema, imagine a helicopter exploding - forever.

Its eye is shining...

 ...is it here for good or ill. Is it here to take us away from this hell...?

 ...and we ascend vulnerable, hanging as if by a string.

A helicopter can be devil, a swarm of death from above, or, in the same guise, angel - mercy and salvation on its whirring wings.

Maybe it is just a mystery...

*A helicopter being looked upon like an insect is an image brilliantly used in the first (later pulled) trailer for Spider-man, when it is caught like a fly in a web that spans the gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center :

Remakes : Why not?

a 

Nothing seems to raise the hackles like the news that a film is being remade, with the idea more likely to be scorned if it is a remake of an old American classic or a rushed reboot of a modern gem of foreign cinema.

The Thing, the second remake, after John Carpenter's The Thing, of The Thing From Another World from 1951, has just been released and David Fincher's remake/adaptation of the Swedish film/book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo followed a few weeks ago. There are plenty more in the pipeline too, such as South Korean Park Chan Wook's Oldboy in the hands of Spike Lee and Japanese manga/anime staple Akira given over to Jaume Collet-Serra. Soon we will discover who will walk in the footsteps of Paul Muni and Al Pacino to play Scarface.

Why not just watch or promote the original? Whither originality? Is it knocked down in the pursuit of a fast buck?

Why might films be remade?

Perhaps the original has a formula proven to be successful. A good idea is a good idea. Take something strong and economically viable and repeat. Take something cult and roll it out. A name, a brand could represent the closest to a sure thing.

Films might be remade for love of the original - to be part, in retrospect, of the process of the object of one's affection, to be responsible for the extension and curation of its life. On the other hand it could be dissatisfaction with the original that drives the project - the ideas were sound but the execution could be improved upon.

Although we tend to poo-poo the idea, different countries do have different sensibilities. Remaking a film in your own language whilst paying attention to cultural nuances will engage more people. Either way, with a new director, actors, director of photography, landscape, language etc nothing could possibly remain the same.

Likewise, we adapt ourselves as receivers of signals depending on who we know is sending it. Would Exorcist II,  feverish and outlandish as it is, be beloved if it were an Italian horror film? Would its oddness, borderline amateurishness, be more easily enjoyed and admired? I hazard to guess 'yes'.

Subtitles, which distract attention from the image and which turn the aural into visual, change the nature of the film more than we might acknowledge. What is written, even with an aural and acted accompaniment, is experienced quite apart to the same thing heard, responding uniquely to their unique forms and the conventional ways of interacting that appear to govern them.

Was Wong Kar Wai's first English language film, My Blueberry Nights, his least successful critically because his poeticism doesn't work in quite the same way coming out of people's mouths (frankly artificial) as opposed to written and underscoring the action with gobbets of charming romanticism? Does the brilliance in his chinese-language films become soppy and inauthentic in the simple step from those white letters (accompanied by a musical, purely emotion-infused vocal murmuring) to the aural plane? What is said tends to have more responsibility to realism and functionality.

Furthermore, and paying no heed to the snobs, there are those who find it hard to watch subtitled films and it is obvious why.

Remakes (or adaptations from one media to another for that matter) offer fascinating insights into story making and story telling. They make you think about how something is put together, about structure, about characterisation, about technique, cause and effect. These are vital educational tools for the young and old - how has Martin Scorsese transposed
The Invention of Hugo Cabret to the screen in Hugo? How has Middle Earth changed through Peter Jackson's lens? What is happening to the frameworks of Rio Bravo as it transmogrifies through Assault on Precinct 13 and the French film Nid de Guepes? How has Therese Raquin, in tone and pungent odour, been transformed into 21st Century South Korean vampire story Thirst?

Remakes, comparisons, allow us to think about the soul of the thing. To think about the craft of art. Riffs and versions on the same idea - Infernal Affairs and The Departed. [Rec] and Quarantine. Not dispiriting. An exciting opportunity.

[Rec] and Quarantine

Once a film has been remade and we have two passes over basically the same material, a HYPOTHETICAL ORIGINAL is born - a ghost but with a form. The hypothetical original exists in our mind even without a remake but a remake brings it into focus. What it is is not so much what the versions share but what they appear to be responding and commenting on. The two films are in fact both versions of this hypothetical original.

The original isn't the be all and end all, its own mausoleum. It is living. Why do Directors remake their own films? Hideo Nakata remade The Ring in America. Likewise Takashi Shimizu and The Grudge. Yasujiro Ozu remade the black and white A Story of Floating Weeds as the technicolour Floating Weeds, Michael Haneke, Funny Games. Leo McCarey's Love Affair was indeed An Affair to Remember. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much knew it twice, and Cecil B DeMille adapted the play The Squaw Man on three occasions, in 1914, 1918 and 1931.

They want to get closer to the perfection in their heads. They want to take advantage of new technologies. The original is not the original. It is in the mind and out there like a mist. They want another opportunity to revisit the same people and places and make right. Art lets you come back and remould, albeit with new clay.

Even though Alfred Hitchcock himself remade his own films and adapted a vast amount of short stories and novels, Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock's Psycho was greeted by outrage. Is Van Sant's film redundant because it is almost a carbon copy? Far from it. It is redundant because it is not a carbon copy (in terms of shots). If it were it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experiment in which variables could be studied and where the magic of film would be shown to reside between the shots and without their confines.

What is a sequel if not a species of remake?

Do remakes hold back American cinema? Are they made to bury the originality of non-hollywood cinema? Are they supermarkets stocking products you can purchase in delicatessens and selling them cheaper?

           The Thing (2011)

Is it vandalism?

Does it do the original works a disservice? Does it alter the brand even if the original remains untouched? Does it replace the original in the public's mind and if so, would people only be aware of the original because of the remake?

Why are commerce and money dirty words? Art has always revolved, and needed to revolve, around money as a facilitator and a spur. All artists should be penniless, destitute martyrs (warming their hands over their authentic inner voice) in their lifetimes and enjoy fame and fortune from the grave.

When we think 'remake' do we actually think that the films are re-made as if something that was sacred is now sinned against and reanimated as a zombie, abhorrent to behold? No two films could ever be the same. Swapping Peter Lorre for James Stewart, or Tony Leung for Leonardo Di Caprio, brings an entirely different colour to a character. A remake will always be worthwhile. The present doesn't change the past. A remake does no trampling and means no disrespect.

We accept countless incarnations of plays because there is no original performance, and endless repetitions of classical music written before the era of recorded sound.

Film is obviously a special case, but perhaps we could try to forget what remakes might mean and enjoy them for what they are - to use something of the approach we take when it comes to the fertile cross-germination of high art when we think of film, an art that, although it may give us pleasure, we are awfully quick to bring low.

Sucker Punch - Film of the Year 2011

Sucker Punch is the story of the abuse of women, domestic and institutional historical and modern. It is the story of five girls/young women, and one in particular - Baby Doll, an orphan.

She has been placed in a mental hospital (framed by her step-father for the death of her sister) in which she is destined to receive a lobotomy. As she is about to be operated on, she finds it within herself to move to a new reality - a brothel. Here she is being prepared to have sexual intercourse with a man called the High Roller. In preparation for this meeting, Baby Doll is told that she must learn to dance.

Her dancing transfixes the men in her presence, which hypnotism her new-found friends (also present in the brothel reality) take advantage of to acquire five items that she believes will help them escape. Just as the men are distracted, so are we, for we do not see her dance but are instead led into a splendidly exciting third reality - where the girls fight battles with samurai monsters, zombie nazis and fire-breathing dragons (traditionally male arenas) - through which we see those quests played out.

Here the girls adapt the costumes of exploitation, cutting their outfits into attractive uniforms for battle against it, draining them of associations of filth and breathing soul into body, turning revulsion into revelry and an adventure of freedom. Within seconds I did not see exposed flesh and live toys to be fondled - I only saw them. We revel in them and with them (and of course there is nothing wrong with finding women attractive or with lust).

What is ugly is made beautiful, just as the tomb of a moth secretly becomes the womb of a butterfly. What may tempt some is acknowledged, laid in front of us and then remodelled.

What is more, there is no hatred, no vindictiveness, no revenge. Baby Doll's abusive step-father quickly disappears from the stage. No-one is hounded, humiliated or 'made to pay'. The girls show mercy throughout. Only inner strength and self-respect count. This is not about women versus men but right versus wrong and humanity versus inhumanity. Calling for a reductive label to be put on a film (feminist, chauvinist, degrading or empowering?) pretzel-twists all nuance, delicacy, and personal responsibility and morality out of the equation.

All that matters is that we care. And I did.

Sucker Punch speaks the right language. It places us both in the girls' shoes, pained, uplifted and inspired, and in those of their oppressors. Sucker Punch lives in the midst of what it criticises.

Are we to be distracted from what is really happening in the brothel, what is really happening in the hospital? Will we allow, like those men in the dark, our soul to be stolen from under our nose, bewitched by these loud noises,  these propulsive songs and intense gyrations? These abstractions are used to divert us, to make the story palatable, to turn barren, po-faced lecture (many films about abuse tastefully leave our possible complicity and the gradations of exploitation to one side) into apt demonstration and to mirror the closed doors and drawn curtains behind which awful acts are perpetrated.

There are risks to giving medicine with sugar (to having one's cake and eating it) as some will taste only the sickly sweet and relish the boobs (albeit there are no lascivious or gratuitous shots whatsoever), the lipstick smears and the ejaculatory gunfire. For them the film may be encouragement for 'objectification' or 'mindlessness'. Many critics and viewers have indeed seen the film itself, rather than its situation, as degrading and misogynistic.

What do you see?

Each action is code for another on a different layer, each object has a counterpart elsewhere on a second and third map. Sucker Punch is strong and dark with metaphor, its structure brilliantly interwoven with its message. These are not the tangential puzzles found in Mulholland Drive or Inception. Rather they drive to the very heart of the narrative. There is no obfuscation.

We are exhilarated and moved by camaraderie and solidarity and sacrifice. We are saddened and perturbed as the meaning of what we see is exposed by its echoes. Sucker Punch is massively enjoyable and increasingly hard to watch for what's at stake.

When do these stories begin to break through the screen?

What do the dances in the brothel mean in the hospital - do they stand for therapy or for rape? Does sex with the high roller in the brothel mean a lobotomy in the hospital? There is no easy way out. The realities are not dreams or escapes, but vivid and tangible expressions, paths to clawing back a little independence, dignity and happiness. This is non-escapist entertainment that, cleverly and (I believe) necessarily, looks and sounds like escapist entertainment.

Sucker Punch promotes the significance and power of love, of the mind, of stories, of film, of allegory, and of physical intimacy.

Are we perverts for pulling these curtains back? Or are we exposing something true and rotten?

Fun, intelligent and emotionally powerful. The finest film of the year.

Film and Musicality : The Importance of Tempo, Rhythm, Length and Timing

f 

Why we like or dislike a film may rarely be in step with our conscious rationale of why.

Art is an odd spell and few of us know which of its words make us fall into a slumber and which snap us back to reality. The tiniest things can make all the difference - even a pink sweater instead of red...

We talk about liking the plot, the ideas, the look, the atmosphere, the music, the characters, the acting and all the combinations of the above. It is easier to quantify, understand and communicate these bigger and more obvious components of a film, and much harder to pin down the smaller parts that give each film its unique fingerprint.

We must struggle, too, with the idea that films may be made out of different components but that they categorically do not work on us in that way. These components cannot be fully separated once they have been put together.

One of the elements least (consciously) acknowledged when we look over our experience of a film is what we could call the work's 'musicality'. Yes, we may talk about a film being too long or too short, or about it moving too slowly or too quickly, but little else besides.

So what are we discussing when it comes to tempo, rhythm, length and timing?

Shot length / Placement of Cut 

Is the shot too short or too long? In a film that sets its heartbeat at 40 a shot that lasts for a few minutes may be perfect.  One such is a mesmerising journey on a train at the beginning of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks.

One shouldn't underestimate the difference that a fraction of a second can make. Intrigue can flip to boredom at a moment's notice.

Is the movement of the camera or movement within the frame demanding a cut? Is the action inappropriately truncated? Has an emotional arc, or a developing ambience been betrayed?

Scene length

Is the scene too short or too long? There will come a point where a scene will outstay its welcome or, on the other hand, stop when we wish it hadn't. This may only be felt as a barely perceptible twinge.

The pace/build of action and plot progression

Is the story being served properly? Is it being allowed to breathe the right air? Is it ahead of itself or behind? Is too much said too early or too late? Is there enough in the film to sustain the time given to it?

What is the mix of quickness and slowness? Is it too programmatic, episodic or set to one particular rhythm?

Time spent on each part of the story or each geographical location

Is too much emphasis placed on certain plot strands?

Let the Right One In, having established the core of the story as the relationship between the two youngsters and courted our interest with its flourishing, wastes a surfeit of time on Eli's quest for blood.

Timing of reactions to actions / Timing of Edits

We must bear in mind that actors aren't actually 'reacting' to what is news to the characters.
      
Let us take Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an example. On multiple occasions people act and react a split second too early or too late, whether through the fault of the acting or of the editing. We are instinctively alarmed by the unnatural.


These are only brief thoughts, a polite pointing in the direction of something camouflaged. The right thing at the right time can produce magic; the right thing at the wrong time, discordance;  wrong thing at the wrong time, ruin.

All of these elements form part of an overarching mother rhythm and length. Have we spent enough time extracting the juice of the story - exploring implications, feeling emotions, sensing surroundings...?

It is a mistake to think of a film as having one body with one unchanging rhythm. It changes itself and it changes as we change in response. It is constantly adapting itself to serve the story. You cannot think of a film as being in four-four time or six-eight.

This is not pro the metrics of cinema, which are intriguing as tools to map cinema's mechanical evolution, but of limited use in explaining our idiosyncratic thoughts or sensations. Such-and-such a technique can never guarantee such-and-such an effect. We can say that something made us feel in a certain way but there are no universal conclusions to be drawn.

It is for each of us to feel and, in any way we can, explain our individual responses. 

It is useful, nevertheless, to be aware of what may have an influence on the viewer. We should try and engage with the musical in film, that which flits between the scientific, the personal and the philosophical

This musical nature will make or break a film in spite, often, of everything else within it.