Ntuple Indemnity

A few disconnected notes from recent weeks:

Prior to last weekend’s Vanier Cup, the top prize in CIS “football”, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix ran an article on the players permanently affixed to the bench (“‘Redshirts’ key to Green and White”, 22 November 2006). I mention this primarily because they interviewed my elementary-school partner-in-crime Russell Webb, who is now at the end of a five-year career sitting on the bench for the Huskies, but also because I can’t help but notice that Star Trek terminology has entered the general lexicon.

Wikipedia tells me that the use of the term redshirt has a distinct etymology in the context of college sports, since red is a common scrimmage jersey colour, but I don’t buy that. I think that has at least been absorbed, if not superceded, by the more familiar meaning that refers to the junior ensigns on the Enterprise who serve as dutiful away-mission cannon-fodder.

Next: Cartoon Brew recently linked to a post on the five lamest Charlie Brown cartoons. #3 is a Cheerios commercial (and a link to a special about leukemia), and #5 is a Family Guy clip as uninspired as the rest of that show has been in recent seasons. They are new to me. Not only do I remember the other three, I own them. Yes, that includes the disco-fever Snoopy of It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown. Hey, it was catchy at the time. In my defence, I would say that I do consider Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home to be rather good; believe it or not, the melodrama works. (The latter is legendary in its own right for the “No Dogs Allowed” sign and accompanying jingle.)

Next: I am six dungeons into Twilight Princess, and at the gates of the seventh; naturally, this comes directly at the expense of my academic work (and so, for that matter, does the act of confessing that in writing). I am astounded by this game’s continued ability to surprise at every turn. You see a pit you cannot traverse, and you think you’re going to pick up some Hover Boots. Nope! You see a block of ice in your way, and you think you’re going to pick up a Fire Rod. Nope! The surprise, though, is that what you actually do obtain is a lot more fun. Aesthetically, I still prefer most of the enemy designs from The Wind Waker, but that’s neither here nor there. More on this some other time; I don’t expect I’ll be shutting up about Zelda anytime soon.

Next: While I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to current cinema, and while I have a lot of elaboration to do on all of the below (if only I had the time), I want to offer a few brief, undefended impressions. I’ve only seen each of these once, and opinions may change.

Death of a President: Technically and logistically interesting, but surprisingly tame. There is nothing controversial about this movie. Speculative history doesn’t work if you don’t take any risks. No, the assassination of George W. Bush is not, in itself, enough of a risk.

Babel: In recent years we’ve seen the popular emergence of ensemble films consisting of parallel stories connected only by thematic material and trifles of cause and effect. Traffic was nominated for Best Picture in 2000, and while I admired it, I found the actual parallel storylines to be weak in isolation. Crash won Best Picture in 2005, and while it was both engaging and fun, the thematic material was often much too overt and heavy-handed to make an effective statement on racism. I would argue that Babel is a better film than both of these, and perhaps the best film I’ve seen in this ensemble format, precisely because it is strong on both accounts. I will be returning to this movie, and unless I was fooled by first impressions, I think it should be a legitimate contender this year.

Flushed Away: To paraphrase a scene from the film – “amusing”, and by that, I mean “diverting”. There’s a lot of classic Aardman irony that begs to come out in this film, and a lot of their stop-motion character designs survive the translation to CG (watch the exaggerated mouth movements and how they sync with the dialogue). However, I think the pace of the action is often much too frantic, and it’s really quite inexcusable to have so much forgettable licensed music obscure the score by Harry Gregson-Williams, one of the most interesting film composers of the past decade and such an integral part of Chicken Run. I may come to think better of this film in time, but I do think that despite its strengths, it doesn’t distinguish itself from the Great CG Cesspool of 2006 as effectively as I’d hoped.

Borat: Occasionally hilarious in the tradition of “informed silliness” pioneered by the Monty Python troupe. That said, this movie runs into the same problem as Rowan Atkinson’s Bean did back in 1998: it fails to situate its disconnected sketches within a narrative good enough to justify its feature-length running time. The Pamela Anderson business simply doesn’t cut it, and I do wish it was there as more than just a middling excuse for a frame story. Also, in the odd moments when the jokes are misfires, there’s an awkward dead space in Cohen’s timing where laughter is supposed to be, and it’s very obvious. I speculate that the larger the audience you’re in, the less often you will see this happen.

Casino Royale: I can’t praise this film enough. I haven’t seen all twenty-one Bond films, but I am ready to declare this one the best. It is certainly the closest to the Ian Fleming ideal, and without a doubt, exactly the kind of Bond film I’ve wanted to see for years. As trepidatious as I was of the substitution of poker for baccarat, when the baccarat scenes in the book were probably the most electric card-playing passages I’ve read in any novel, the execution is superb. I may write a more thorough post on Casino Royale at some point, because there’s just so much to applaud.

Next: nationhood. Maybe. It’s an infuriating issue exacerbated by the wild stupidity in this country in the past few weeks. I know this blog is predominantly apolitical, unlike those of my compatriots in the immediate vicinity (Dan Arnold, for instance), but poke a sleeping dragon in the eye with sharp enough a stick and he’s bound to wake. Or, as J.K. Rowling would put it, draco dormiens nunquam titillandus.

So while I was watching Calgary’s victorious home opener tonight, a few conveniently placed intermissions and commercial breaks permitted me to regale the resident kid brother with storied knickknacks of the franchise’s history.

The exercise demonstrated, once again, that one of the best ways to notice new things about a story is to tell it. Here’s tonight’s curiosity: isn’t it odd that at the team’s inception, they christened it the Atlanta Flames? Were they proud of Union soldiers burning their city to the ground – or did they, frankly, not give a damn?

[Edit: According to these guys, that was a very good guess.]

Insert clever transition here.

It’s a strange experience to watch a cinematic remake immediately after the original film. It is not unlike reading a book right before you see its adaptation. When it comes to books, I know that for some people, it’s hardly ever a pleasant experience: they get all worked up about adaptation issues and never manage to get over them. For me, there is usually something unsettling that results from how the absences and changes are just as visible as what actually ends up on the screen, but this is typically outweighed by my attention to the use of film language in negotiating the inevitable gulfs. See my piece on The Phantom of the Opera for details.

Remakes, however, are a different matter. I think we often have a tendency to think of them as “new versions” of a story rather than “adaptations” in the same sense as books and stage plays. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho aside, our expectations typically extend as far as a reimagining of the holistic story and characters, and not shot-for-shot, plot-for-plot replication.

So it’s delightful when Naomi Watts steals an apple and Adrien Brody carries her down a vine in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and it’s especially entertaining to us film nerds when the original film is hypodiegetically embedded in Jack Black’s film shoot on the ship; and then there’s the spider sequence, which is (oddly enough) a homage to a scene explicitly not in the original; but we see these as luxuries, and we could have done without them just the same.

That brings us to this weekend’s big release, The Departed.

A brief primer for those of you who don’t keep up with such things, and expect me to do it for you: Scorsese’s latest film is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs, which quickly became Hong Kong cinema’s biggest phenomenon this decade not involving the farcical antics of Stephen Chow. The premise is deceptively simple: a police spy embedded in a triad (Tony Leung or, if you prefer, Leonardo DiCaprio) and a triad spy embedded in the police department (Andy Lau or, if you prefer, Matt Damon) attempt to fish each other out in a meticulous demonstration of what game theorists refer to as a simultaneous game of incomplete information.

If you haven’t seen Infernal Affairs, I highly recommend that you do. I revisited it last night, heeding a warning from a fellow film buff that it doesn’t hold up as well on a second viewing, only to discover that – while the shock value is gone, and there are two or three leaps of logic that arguably qualify as plot holes – the film is every bit as intricate as I remembered on the levels of direction, editing, performance and general craftsmanship.

A wise choice, then, for Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan to adhere very, very closely to the sequence of actions in the original. Sure, the locales and actors are different, a few supporting characters are split and merged, and I’m told there are elements from the two sequels that emerged within a year of the original’s release. (Mark Wahlberg’s character is allegedly grafted from Infernal Affairs III.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but stack one film atop the other, and they mesh in an alignment I’d even call homomorphic.

But because the two films are so similar, and differ primarily in execution, I do feel compelled to compare them. I think my renewed familiarity with Infernal Affairs tempered my enjoyment of The Departed somewhat, and I suspect the latter deserves a second chance on a clean slate. I highly recommend them both, but neither one is free of imperfections. In that sense, I almost find that one complements the other.

Here’s what The Departed does better: onscreen violence, cinematography, verbal humour, the exchange of contraband, Jack Nicholson, clever visual motifs (I’m thinking of the final shot in particular), the budget, Catholicism, spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to flesh out the motivations so nobody is left questioning why X knows/trusts/kills Y.

Here’s what Infernal Affairs does better: offscreen violence, editing, pacing of the opening act, sting operations, Morse Code, Buddhism, not spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to beat it over the head with clues and motivations until it resonates with the guest appearance of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

Draw: stellar lead performances, use of cellular telephones, plot holes.

On balance, I prefer the original. I’ll concede that it is sometimes too subtle for its own good, just as The Departed is a bit heavy-handed when it comes to trying to explain everything (and still falling short in completely new ways). It doesn’t wave clues in your face like its American sibling, but it does indulge in the occasional redundant flashback to slap you twice with a revelation after it has been made. The two films tell the story from opposite directions, and different problems surface.

What The Departed doesn’t preserve about Infernal Affairs is its acute sense of perspective.

One of the core principles of film language is that while the audience is receiving visual data in a blinking rectangle, that does not mean films inherently work in a third-person objective point of view. Framing, blocking, the sequential ordering and timing of reaction shots – all of these elements contribute to a sense of omniscience and empathy, leading us inside a character’s point of view even as we see her face. Hitchcock played with this to no end. Hell, Scorsese plays with this to no end… just not up to his usual standard here.

It’s almost certainly an editing issue. There’s a big moment in both films that I won’t spoil, but it involves, er, gravity. In Infernal Affairs, it happens behind Tony Leung as he walks towards the camera, and it’s as much a punch in the gut for us as it is for him. (It says something that it still worked the second time through the film, even though I saw it coming.) In The Departed, the audience sees what happens long before Leonardo DiCaprio’s character; the eye level contributes to this, too. Something about it just doesn’t work: the timing and cutting feel off.

The Departed consistently opts for the visceral over what makes the most sense, perspectivally speaking. Mind you, Scorsese is still a master of the visceral; but that doesn’t always fit, especially in a film built on a concept that is all about the limited perspectives of the main characters progressing in blind, meandering baby steps.

Watch them both, though. I can’t think of a better exercise to teach yourself about the differing conventions and values of Hong Kong and American cinema, even if you presume that you’re already familiar with one or the other.

(The likely scenario is that you’ll only manage to see The Departed, which is playing in “theatres everywhere”, while Infernal Affairs is not. In that case, enjoy the element of surprise. I think that may have been missing in my experience, as there is very little in the Gotcha Department that Infernal Affairs doesn’t already do.)

It’s no secret that Language Log is still my favourite blog, but what you might not know is that Cartoon Brew makes a strong case for second place. Last week it ran a series of stories about the dismissive ignorance of film critics, sparked in part by Mick LaSalle’s review of Monster House in The San Francisco Chronicle, where he essentially claims that motion-capture has made animation obsolete. The Brew’s coverage is located, in ascending chronological order, here, here, here, here, here and here. I was going to write a refutation of my own, heavily doused in theoretical claims about the distinction between realism and verisimilitude and the Uncanny Valley (and perhaps a few words on A Scanner Darkly), but Real Animators have already done a much better job.

Instead, what I want to examine is not so much the side of the issue concerning animation, but rather, matters pertaining to criticism itself.

I write about film from time to time, even for money on the odd occasion. While everybody who partakes in criticism, no matter how amateur, has a stake in advancing a subjective personal opinion, I like to think that my primary agenda is to advance an educated discourse about cinema. Simply put, I can’t abide people who don’t know what they’re talking about; and when it comes to film, layperson opinions are a denarius a dozen. At the same time, I do not believe that one needs to do something in order to be qualified to discuss it, which is usually the party line of the anti-critical establishment.

That does not excuse a critic from fulfilling the basic journalistic responsibility to Not Be Stupid.

I may be someone with nary a sliver of animating talent, and to say that there’s a lot I haven’t seen (Monster House included) would be a gross understatement, but I do like to think that I pay attention. So when high-profile critics like A.O. Scott of The New York Times write utter nonsense about how Monster House “uses the digitally captured movements of real actors rather than computer-generated algorithms as the basis for its animated images” (emphasis mine), my face does that crazy thing that happens every time someone in the vicinity mentions Dan Brown.

(Hmm. I suppose that’s not a very good example, given that I have a degree that says I know what algorithms are.)

There’s obviously some kind of perception gap among critics, and perhaps the general public, that confines animated films to second-class status. This is strange if you think about it, because animation is really just the continued exploration of the first principles that define everything that we perceive to be a “motion picture” to begin with.

It reminds me of another trend that I see a lot, which is the public perception of special effects and their role in live-action filmmaking. Technological advances are often greeted with a excess of enthusiasm or a surfeit of suspicion. I’ve lost track of how many writers who know way more about film theory than I do – Roger Ebert, for one – lambasted the likes of Gladiator, The Fellowship of the Ring and Attack of the Clones for allegedly intrusive computer graphics, only to go on and cite examples that were precisely the scenes composed using traditional techniques, not CG. In fact, I think the first thing I ever wrote in The Gateway was a letter picking apart an article of this flavour by then-A&E Editor Adam Rozenhart, who subsequently suggested I volunteer.

Film critics aren’t complete idiots. Okay, some of them are, but for the most part, the ones that have gotten anywhere have at least an elementary grasp of what “story” means in a cinematic context, how a film is assembled and who to blame when something goes awry – to say nothing of an awareness of history, and a veritable library of filmgoing experience to fall back on. Yet there is an overwhelming epidemic of total incompetence when it comes to evaluating the impact of technology on film.

One big brouhaha that has been making the rounds in the video game press lately is Esquire writer Chuck Klosterman bemoaning, “There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing.” I like the sheepish consensus that Klosterman simply didn’t look very hard, and Jerry Holkins (“Tycho” of Penny Arcade) is precisely who he’s looking for. But the best response I’ve found is this terrific piece by Chris Dahlen. “We don’t have a new Bangs or Thompson yet,” argues Dahlen, “because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don’t know how to write about technology.”

I think that’s the problem with animation. It’s a technology story. The critics who mishandle it think about it as an experimental bastard-child offspring for kids, a testbed for ever-improving methods marching and heiling towards some indeterminate horizon of progress. The Hollywood execs play into their hands, and the end result is the flooding of the CG market that we’ve seen all year.

You’ll often hear the same films referred to over and over as being the landmark advances of the form. You’ll read that Steamboat Willie gave as sound as we know it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was animation’s induction into feature-length territory, and Toy Story did the same for the digital age and shifted the mode of thought from drawing to sculpting. Framing the history of animation as a series of technological advances is really easy to do.

But it’s also a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. While these films were undoubtedly seminal in method, that’s not why we remember them. We remember them for the echoes of a wishing well and a toy in a spacesuit falling with style. That such masterworks of storytelling were also technical pioneers is a happy coincidence.

You wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve encountered believe that The Wizard of Oz was the first live-action film in full colour. In fact, at the time of its release (1939), three-strip Technicolor had been around for five years, and colour processes in general were decades along. My theory is that The Wizard of Oz – specifically, the scene where Dorothy steps out of her monochromatic Kansas farmhouse and into vivid Munchkinland – made a permanent, transitional impression on the collective consciousness that said, nay, spake, “Let there be colour.” And we saw that it was good.

It’s easy to see something marvelous and say, “It must be the technology,” when really, it’s “merely” storytelling with the sublimity to fool you into believing that cameras and algorithms did all the work. Nobody would have cared a lick about the T-rex in Jurassic Park if he wasn’t an object in the mirror closer than he appeared, or if he never bellowed as the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner floated to the ground. Take the films that we revere as technical landmarks and you’ll see that they weren’t technologically driven like their imitators, but technologically permitted.

I speculate that animation criticism is at an impasse precisely because the dream factory that produces the most dazzling visual fireworks is also the one where Story Is King. As a filmgoer detached from the process – critic, businessman, hockey mom – it’s easy to conflate the two as synonymous.

The fellows at Pixar recognize that the relationship between the tools and the work of art is a permissive one. They have all these fancy specular lighting tricks up their sleeves, but the clever part is when they use them to develop character; for instance, Lightning McQueen’s obsession with his lucky sticker. Ka-chow.

The latest GameSpot Rumor Control takes on a post at The Movie Center suggesting that Tim Burton has, on his lap, the script to a film adaptation of Grim Fandango.

It’s a whisper of a rumour, with almost no ancillary evidence to back it up, but even if it turned out to be completely false, I would remain enheartened that somebody out there shares the same crazy fanboy fantasy.

Grim Fandango is my dream film adaptation. I have devoted a lot of thought as to how I might film it myself, should I ever acquire the skill or the budget to do so, never mind the rights, and it was long ago that I came to the conclusion that it must be done in stop-motion. There is no other way. And – as I have alluded to before – when I saw the designs for the underworld in Corpse Bride, the same convergence of a smoky jazz-beat atmosphere and the calavera figures of the Mexican Day of the Dead as in Tim Schafer’s seminal masterpiece, it was clear to the point of total conviction: a Grim Fandango film should look like that.

For those of you not in the know (as I have realized that those unfamiliar with PC games are really unfamiliar with the recesses of its history, given the short shelf-life of anything that isn’t a blockbuster), Grim Fandango is, in my professional opinion, the greatest masterwork of interactive entertainment in the domains of script, story and artistic concept. If you look at the camp that continues to insist that the nondeterminism of the medium precludes it from being considered “art” (here’s looking at you, Roger Ebert – and do get well soon), I am willing to bet you that none of them have even heard of it. This is the one game I can name that is, beyond any doubt, literature.

Released in 1998, it was the last hurrah of the LucasArts adventure (cf. the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road), the paragon of the genre and at the same time its epitaph. This was the same year that the PC first-person shooter reached maturity with Half-Life, and real-time strategy hit its stride with its own instant classic, StarCraft, so it’s no wonder that linear storytelling driven by dialogue branches and item-based puzzles fell out of vogue.

For all the attention to craftsmanship that branching dialogue is receiving again – consider Bioware’s experiments in using conversation as a concrete, outcome-affecting form of action in games such as Knights of the Old Republic – nothing comes close to the narrative design in Fandango.

In one sequence, a woman rambles on about her sordid childhood while it is your task to pretend to listen, and try to get a word in edgewise and convince her to hand over a tool you require to progress. In another, you improvise beat poetry at a club on open mic night. The range of responses available to you in a conversation is often itself the punch line.

A few months ago, I played through the whole adventure again over the course of a weekend. Thanks to its painterly pre-rendered backgrounds, the graphics have not suffered from too much aging. In the game’s final sequence, there is a haunting shot of a vintage automobile parked at the foot of a flowery meadow, a greenhouse in the distance. See, in the Land of the Dead, plants are a symbol of the final death in the afterlife.

Whenever I start talking about this game, I can’t help but get carried away. I should stop. Find it and play it, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Some home entertainment stores sell old PC games in jewel cases for ten-dollar bargains. I also have a copy.

I had a point in there somewhere, and I hadn’t even mentioned the flaming beavers. If a decent Grim Fandango script has indeed found its way to Tim Burton, and it is being given serious consideration, something is going right. I would be tempted to get Tim Schafer aboard the project, much like how Rodriguez got Frank Miller on the set of Sin City.

Speaking of Frank Miller, you may have heard that one Zack Snyder is currently working on 300, Miller’s graphic novel about Thermopylae. He’d better be worth his salt, because he is now the director attached to Watchmen, which got off the ground again after the modest success of V for Vendetta. Since reading Watchmen a few years ago, I have seen the film project elude Darren Aronofsky, David Hayter and Paul Greengrass, and that’s saying nothing of Terry Gilliam’s aborted concept of doing a twelve-hour twelve-parter from a decade ago. Hopefully Snyder makes it worth the wait; this is another one that needs to be done right.

I have a few remarks to make about this year’s Oscar nominations.

First off, all the number-crunchers out there lambasting 2005 as a slump year couldn’t be more wrong. This year’s nomination field for Best Picture is, overall, the strongest and most balanced I’ve seen for quite some time. The one of the five I have not seen is Crash, which everybody keeps saying is Paul Haggis’ directorial debut for some reason when his real debut, the quite excellent (and very obscure) Canadian production Red Hot, was a full thirteen years ago. I can’t comment on that one, but I was very impressed with the other four. The big story is that the five contenders are all serious, intelligent dramatic films and, to varying extents, independent productions.

Now, at this point, Brokeback Mountain is practically guaranteed to take home the top prize based on other awards events and the all-important guilds, though my personal pick remains Munich. But all four of the five that I sat through are films of such a high calibre that they’d make a serious and deserving bid for the win in almost any other year. And beyond that, it still feels like some of the best movies I saw this year are not on the shortlist, though I have no idea what they would replace. Among them are King Kong, The Constant Gardener, Wallace & Gromit, and maybe A History of Violence, which is growing on me the more I think about it. Make no mistake: 2005 was a very good year. That is, unless your film was computer animated. We’ll get to that.

The single most atrocious absence is Revenge of the Sith in the Visual Effects category. Narnia? Are you kidding? The awards establishment has been progressively (or rather, regressively) less kind to the Star Wars saga over the years, but I never thought it would go quite this far. Now, I think this is King Kong‘s award to win, but to ignore Episode III completely is just bizarre.

For the second year running, my favourite musical score of the year was ignored. Last year it was Michael Giacchino’s work on The Incredibles. This year, it’s James Newton Howard for King Kong. That isn’t to say I don’t admire the music in the five films that were nominated for the award. The piano cues in Pride & Prejudice were arguably the prettiest thing about a very pretty film, Brokeback Mountain sports one of the better scores in its style not written and played by Clint Eastwood, and The Constant Gardener felt very complete as a production in part thanks to its underscore. Munich was tense with percussion and Geisha was lush with exotic colour, but neither of them strike me as that magical sixth win for John Williams alongside Fiddler on the Roof (adapted), Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler’s List. In fact, they don’t come even close. Williams has lost with much better scores in much weaker years.

The point remains that while I wonder how things would have turned out had Howard Shore stayed aboard King Kong or James Newton Howard been hired from the get-go, the end product was great film music in the footsteps of a grand tradition that began with the likes of Max Steiner (whose music to the original King Kong is incorporated into the Jackson film’s “Eighth Wonder of the World” sequence). Corpse Bride, one of the high points of that vintage Danny Elfman sound, is also conspicuously missing. So is Revenge of the Sith, but it looks like John Williams already has his hands full of accolades.

The Original Song award has not had any legitimate reason to exist in at least a decade. This year, it did, thanks to Corpse Bride and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – both of which were left out. It’s seriously high time to scrap this junk filler category if significant in-film showtunes are going to go completely unrecognized.

I’m very pleased to see that the Animated Feature award is earning its keep. All three of this year’s nominees are movies I would buy on DVD and treasure over and over again. I suspected CG would get snubbed entirely, though I wasn’t sure Howl’s Moving Castle was high-profile enough to take the third slot over actual (albeit limited) moneymakers like Madagascar, Robots and Chicken Little. But to my relief, it was; and when awards recognize films that are worth awarding, nobody gets hurt.

Speaking of animation, this is another year where like Boundin’ and Geri’s Game, a Pixar short is cruising to the Oscars before being released to the general public. The one in question is One Man Band, which I assume will be playing in front of Cars. Will it win? I don’t know – I haven’t seen it.

And as for Supporting Actor, it’s about time they nominated Paul Giamatti for something. He should have made the cut last year for Sideways, and he should have won the damned thing for American Splendor. It appears that boxing movies make for compelling sidemen.