Stuff I learned this week – #50/10

5 3D directors – and what we can expect from them

3D is coming at us from several angles at the moment, but has yet to prove that the medium is not the message. I take a look at five directors who drive 3D forward and try to predict what role they will play in the future of stereoscopic filmmaking.

Rise to Power: Made two of the best, action packed Science-Fiction Sequels and created some of the most memorable effects scenes in cinema history with Aliens, the Terminator films and The Abyss. Then went off and realized the highest-grossing film ever. Twice.

Claim to Fame: Almost single-handedly convinced the movie industry that 3D is worth pursuing.

Defining Characteristics: Epic epicness coupled with sentimentality of the highest degree.

Lined up: Two sequels to Avatar that will continue to explore the world he created.

The Verdict: Cameron is a force of nature. What his films lack in artistic merit, they make up for in sheer, inescapable, gripping bombast. There are no signs of this changing in the near future.

Rise to Power: Married effects, character drama and the manipulation of the space-time continuum in classics like the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump.

Claim to Fame: Pioneered and developed “perfomance capturing”, and with it digital 3D, in a series of films that were really not great but succesful enough to keep him going.

Defining Characteristics: Creates settings that eerily sit between animation and live action aesthetics with few cuts and sweeping camera moves to explore 3D.

Lined up: As producer, Mars needs Moms for Disney in which Seth Green plays his inner child. As director, Yellow Submarine, the remake of a film about a band whose latest achievement is making it onto iTunes.

The Verdict: Zemeckis has left his mark in the development of 3D but his style has become a bit predictable and even seems slightly old-fashioned compared to the general zeitgeist.

Rise to Power: After directing several commercials, he revived the American zombie film and brought a new quality of aestheticized violence to Hollywood cinema with 300 and Watchmen.

Claim to Fame: Directed an animated fantasy film about, of all things, owls, which looked stunning but suffered from an overcrowded story.

Defining Characteristics: Applies 3D to both space and time with his signature slow motion fight scenes. Seems to like the grandiose iconography of fascism.

Lined up: His first original screenplay, Sucker Punch, will be converted to 3D, while he tackles the next reboot of the most boring of all superheroes, Superman: Man of Steel.

The Verdict: One of the most challenging visual directors around, to whom 3D seems to come naturally. However, the quality of his films seems to be very dependent on that of the source material.

Rise to Power: Gave stop-motion animation its mainstream groove back by directing Tim Burton’s phantasmagoria The Nightmare before Christmas.

Claim to Fame: Coraline, a film that reads like the book on how 3D should work, especially in animation.

Defining Characteristics: Builds worlds that are slightly askew, both visually and storywise.

Lined up: Has returned to Disney/Pixar to work on more stop motion films.

The Verdict: Might produce the first film for Pixar that actually embraces 3D in its mise-en-scene.

Rise to Power: Made films about maniacs of all colours as part of Germany’s new wave in the 70s, then became one of the most leftfield directors around, creating motion pictures in every genre, form and country.

Claim to Fame: Got exclusive access to ancient French caves to film them in 3D in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Defining Characteristics: Embraces everything that fascinates him and turns it into something strange … and good.

Lined up: No word yet if there’s more 3D to come.

The Verdict: Herzog, with his oddball mentality and his talent for tearing down cinematic borders, might be one of those who leads 3D from childhood to maturity.

Photos by Steve Jurvetson, David Shankbone, rwoan, Thomas Crenshaw and erinc salor, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

Stuff I learned this week – #49/10

Tron:Legacy – My favourite Quote (so far)

I am fascinated, if not obsessed with the idea that we live in the future now. Adam Rogers’s behind-the-scenes article on Tron: Legacy for “Wired” recently demonstrated this point in a way I never really thought about. But it’s true.

All those artists at Digital Domain know they’re creating Tron’s reality by creating it in reality. “We’ve achieved what the first film predicted,” [Director Joseph] Kosinski says. Jeff Bridges had to get a full-body laser scan during preproduction, an eerie hearkening to his digitization in the first movie. When he shot his scenes as Clu, the motion-capture rig he wore to translate his facial movements to Rev 4 included a visor that looked uncannily like the helmet he wore in the original. And the prospect of an unimpeachable, photorealistic avatar for Bridges ought to make the Screen Actors Guild freak out.
(read the whole Article)

It’s really a shame that the new Tron doesn’t arrive in German theaters until the end of January. It’s a film I will hopefully be blogging a lot more about soon.

Stuff I learned this week – #48/10

Aufs Auge gedrückt – 3D überall

Kaum vorstellbar, dass die Kinoleinwand einmal der einzige Bildschirm war, mit dem wir es zu tun hatten. Heute sind wir von Bildschirmen aller Formate umzingelt: Man trägt sie uns nach wie die Werbetafeln in den Städten, und wir tragen sie mit, in Form von Handys und I-Pods. Dennoch scheint es, als wäre das Kino, jenes Urmedium des Bildes, immer noch ein tauglicher Pionier und Innovationsmotor, der Trends etabliert, dem andere Bildmedien nachfolgen können.

Weiterlesen in epd film 12/210

Requiem // 102 – 19

I feel humbled to be able to take part in Requiem // 102, which I wrote about in detail earlier. See all the fascinating contributions on the project’s official site. Here is mine.

Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream comes with a reputation attached. Even though I had somehow managed to not see it yet before I signed up for this project, I knew from countless conversations that Requiem is 1. very disturbing, 2. cut very fast and 3. groundbreaking. While watching it, with the advantage of ten years hindsight of course, I found that it is 1. much too blatant to be disturbing and 2. not actually cut that fast in most portions (and not even that fast in the fast sequences, now that moviegoers’ brains are used to Paul Greengrass movies). I’ll try to get to 3. in the end and talk about my frame first.

The image is from minute 19 of the film and shows Jennifer Connelly’s character Marion looking at herself in her appartment’s bathroom mirror before one of the film’s famous drug montages shows the use of both heroin and cocaine. The drugs turn the desaturated gloom of this image into a triumph: The expressionless face in this frame changes to an expression of bliss, Marion slowly raising her arms while the image fades to white. In the scene before this one, Marion and Harry have decided to spend the money they make through drug dealing on a shop where she can sell her self-made clothes. The couple is not only high on drugs, they are drunk on their expected success.

The juxtaposition of the two facial expressions before and after the consumption of drugs is echoed again in the very fact that Marion is placed in front of a mirror for this scene. There are really two Marions here, the one that she sees („The most beautiful girl in the whole world“, as Harry tells her again and again) and the soon-to-become-lifeless junkie the audience recognizes.

The fact that the self-perception of the characters usually differs greatly from their actual appearance could be called one of the main thematic devices of the film. Here, Marion believes she is on her way up while it’s already pretty clear that the only way for all four main characters is down – after all, the film claims to be a requiem for their dream. Sara’s story expresses this notion even more explicitly: She believes she is looking and feeling great, while her general demeanor already has something quite harrowing about it when Harry visits her, and will collapse into complete delusion later on. Finally, Harry will believe that the wound on his arm is not actually that serious – only to have the same arm amputated in the final scenes.

Aronofsky revisits the bathroom setting, which is exclusively Marion’s domain, for two later scenes which nicely complement this one in the season triptych that structures the narrative. While the junkies are swimming in drug abundance this early in the film, the next scene featuring the bathroom has Marion in a stupor of withdrawal, knocking over furniture in search for drugs (for all his blatantness, Aronofsky resists the cliché of having her smash the mirror). The third act, of course, puts Marion in the bathroom again for one of the film’s most iconic scenes, in which she soaks in the tub and then screams into the water after she slept with Big Tim.

Marion is almost naked in this scene, wearing a bra but no panties, and glimpses of nudity like this one are probably among the reasons why the film caused such a stir at the time. Presented and lit the way it is here, of course, the exposed skin serves both as an indicator for the state of depravity that Marion is already in and as a symbol for her vulnerability.

My general feeling was that Requiem for a Dream, in accordance with its title, works very much like a piece of dramatic classical music, like an opera. Not only because its soundtrack is one of its best assets, but because it paints with such broad strokes, has such a clear-cut, symbol-laden three-act structure (Summer, Fall, Winter) and lets you expect early on that everyone will end up in a most tragic finale. The message that „Because of modern consumerism, we’re all junkies in one way or another“ is hammered home by means of the drug montages throughout the whole film. The concept might have been clever at the time (my comment on the issue of the film being groundbreaking), but I find it quite annoying in much the same way that Requiem seems unnecessesarily pessismistic in the way all characters are denied redemption – not because they’re unwilling to redeem themselves, however, but apparently because as junkies they deserve to be treated like shit by society.

When it comes to drug movies, I have to say I much prefer the three-years-older Trainspotting. It seems superior in the way it first presents you with a vibrant and funny image of being on drugs, only to punch you in the stomach with the horrors that follow. Requiem instead treats you with regular doses of foreboding, hyperbole and sentimentality – overwhelming you in much the same way a drug would do.

Stuff I Learned this Week – #47/10

Mind over Meta!

Rapunzel – Neu Verföhnt

Es gibt einige Momente in Rapunzel, in denen niemand spricht. In diesen Momenten darf man noch einmal erleben, was Animationsfilm bedeuten kann: Charme und Emotionen übertragen, nur durch die Kraft von bewegten Bildern und nachempfundenen Gesten. Kurze Zeit später fangen dann alle wieder an zu reden und zu singen und der Zauber ist vorbei. Das liegt nicht einmal daran, dass Alexandra Neldel und Moritz Bleibtreu Sache als deutsche Synchronsprecher von Rapunzel und ihrem love interest Flynn Rider irgendwie schlecht machen würden, im Gegenteil. Es fällt einfach nur schwer, hinter all den kitschigen Phrasen irgendetwas anderes als Klischees zu entdecken. Zumal nachdem Filme wie Shrek und Verwünscht diese Klischees schon vor Jahren so treffend entlarvt haben.

Weiterlesen – meine erste Kritik für NEGATIV

“Zeit Online” schreibt über Satire – und sitzt ihr selber auf

Die Website Lamebook, die lustige und dumme Statusmeldungen von Facebook sammelt und zum Amusement aller anonymisiert weiterverteilt, streitet sich derzeit mit dem Quell seines Humors, Facebook.

Auch “Zeit Online” hat über diesen Vorgang berichtet. Zu großen Teilen schildert der Artikel die heftige Reaktion von Facebook, die das US-Blog “Techcrunch zuvor auch dokumentiert hatte – unter anderem hatte Facebook Postings, die das Wort “Lamebook” enthielten, für längere Zeit gesperrt. Ein Nutzer, der versuchte, einen Link zu “Lamebook” zu posten, erhielt eine nicht zu umgehende Warnmeldung, er würde Spam posten.

An einer anderen Stelle im Artikel jedoch erscheinen die Maßnahmen von Facebook doch etwas arg drakonisch:

Die Blockade ging so weit, dass Facebook sich in die Kommentar-Threads einzelner User einmischte und sie vor der Verwendung des Begriffes warnte – wie Lamebook selbst dokumentiert.

Ein Kevin schrieb in seine Statusmeldungen den Beginn eines sogenannten Knock-Knock-Jokes: “Klopf, klopf.” Eine Natalie ging auf den Gag ein und antwortete: “Wer ist da?” Kevin: “LAME…” Natalie: “Lame wer?” Um sofort eine Antwort von Facebook zu bekommen mit den drohenden Worten: “Hey Kev, wenn ich du wäre, würde ich den Witz nicht beenden.”

(Link im Originalartikel)

Bei näherem Hinsehen werden hier jedoch Zweifel wach. Nicht nur, weil Lamebook selbst nach seinem angeblichen Screenshot ein “Ba-doom chhh!!” hinterherschickt, sondern weil es doch tatsächlich sehr ungewöhnlich wäre, wenn ein großes Unternehmen wie Facebook sich dazu herablassen würde, seinen Nutzern zu drohen, sie dürften einen Knock-Knock-Joke nicht zuende erzählen (zumal die ganze Pointe dieser Witzgattung darin liegt, dass selten das dabei herauskommt, was man zunächst vermutet).

Eine kurze Nachfrage bei “Lamebook” ergibt auch genau das:

[Y]ou are correct in your assumption. The Knock-Knock-Joke post was photoshopped just to make a point … like a political cartoon, if you will.

So kann es gehen. Man berichtet über Satire und fällt am Ende selber rein. Und wenn man dann nicht auf Hinweise reagiert bleibt alles tagelang im Netz stehen.

P. S.: Ich entschuldige mich für die Schadenfreude.