Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Taking the pulse of Polar Express, plus Anatomy of Hell, Cowboys & Angels, and the DVDs of Takeshi Kitano's The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi and Sonatine; Farmingville and The Lost Boys of Sudan.

"Don't become Ingmar Bergman"

Douglas Rushkoff talks about the present state of movies made to be viewed on cell phones</A>. "You have two minutes. Don't become Ingmar Bergman," says Roberto Croci, AKA Le Bestia, a mobile media director who has his own section on mFlix called Beast Neighborhood. "By the time you spell psychological, the guy is already gone." Croci's films," writes Rushkoff, "are among the most popular on the fledgling mobile channel and his Cooking with the Beast series is a set of hilarious one-minute cooking lessons aimed at bachelors."

Chill factor

So who wants to buy a used technology, slightly soiled and creased, only a century old?

Oh, poor cinema. Here are two opposing trends in movies that have stood out in the movies I've reviewed since summer. There's been a raft of earnest, modestly produced digital video work, mostly documentaries, many hard on the eyes, winding up in Landmark Theaters-type art house multiplexes. Then there are the souped-up super-branded "tentpoles" that stretch the boundaries of technology.

While the stories of wretched movies like Van Helsing drift away on fuzzy patches of videogame-like computer-generated imagery, there are a handful of other movies, costing enormous fortunes, which harness server farms jam-packed with terabytes of memory. Consider: the richly detailed composite city of Sam Raimi & Co.'s work in Spider-Man 2; the superb, eye-thrilling, horizontally inclined design of Pixar and Brad Bird's The Incredibles, and this week, the vaunting ambition and technical wizardry of The Polar Express. (** ½)

Writer-director-producer Robert Zemeckis may wind up being remembered as one of the revolutionaries of big-budget filmmaking, more studied than Spielberg or Lucas or any old Coppola. After a few smart, modest turns like the sweet-tart I Wanna Hold Your Hand and the sweetly grimy Used Cars, he and then-co-writer Bob Gale turned out the Rube Goldberg script for 1941 before inventing Back to the Future.

But as much as he's a clever writer, Zemeckis is also a clever producer. There's a restless yet pragmatic cleverness in his business skills. Such as, in making Castaway, a movie that required months off between shooting the two halves of the movie for Tom Hanks to starve himself, the most cost-effective way to keep his crew together would be to make another movie during the downtime, the visually refined, spatially confined What Lies Beneath. The combination of animation and live action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was pioneering, as was, for its time, the meshing of historical footage with original material in Forrest Gump. The flawed Contact boasts several memorable, extremely inventive and subtle camera techniques that are impossible from a human perspective, but not the imagination. (I can imagine other directors watching, widening their eyes, smiling a small smile as they admire the simplicity and elegance of many of Zemeckis' visual solutions.)

The megadecamillion dollar adaptation of Chris van Allsburg's slim, creepy little 1985 holiday tale, which Zemeckis calls "otherworldly," uses something called "motion capture," in which an actor - Tom Hanks, in this case - is photographed while wearing dozens of little sensors, working without scenery or other actors: in a void that will be peopled and peppered with décor inside a computer. Hanks plays five roles, including "Hero Boy," the little 'un at the center of the story who's urged again and again and again and again to "believe."

And Zemeckis believes in challenges. In pre-release interviews promoting The Polar Express, the 52-year-old Chicago native and multi-role cohort Tom Hanks have laid out some stock observations. But the best rendition of their dares (if not daring) was one Hanks gave the Chicago Sun-Times' Bill Zwecker: "When you work with Bob, it's always a case of him saying… 'If we had any guts, we'd be making this movie.' ... That's the way it has been every time we've done something together."

Especially in its IMAX 3-D incarnation, The Polar Express is indeed something otherworldly, dynamic, inventive, groundbreaking, vertiginous, mostly thrilling in an E-ride sort of way and not a little weird. It's not a folly, but at times, I was reminded of Pauline Kael's nasty crack about One From the Heart, calling that crackbrained folly "One From the Lab."

In an IMAX theater, you're in the middle of a world, a machine that wants little more than to to choke you with fluff and fairy dust. The result may be the most joyous bit of filmmaking craft I've ever witnessed that has left me feeling so uncomfortable. A generation of videogame consumers may feel differently, getting use to peculiar stylizations of the human form, and as the success of kid-pandering cartoons always proves, young children are able to empathize with many, many forms of visual representation: fish, bears, mice. My reaction may come partly from the strangeness of the large-eyed computer-generated characters, as well as from the fact that such a range of talent and innovation is being put to use in a very public form of research and development, as much as a costly first leap into another generation of visual storytelling that I dearly wish American movies not to become. While there are rumors that the budget of The Polar Express neared $200 million, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it cost more, chalked up somewhere in the Time Warner books as an R&D precursor of movies to come, the way that George Lucas produced the woeful Radioland Murders in order to discover how to shoot actors in a void.

Those movies to come include 2005's Monster House, now filming, entitled when it was announced as the "Zemeckis/Spielberg Motion Capture Project." I want to be transported and transfixed and not to feel the itch to run back into the world when I'm watching a movie. I want to see the human face, photographed with compassion and fierce grace.

A close-up of the human face: there is one in the middle of the giddily funereal Birth, of Nicole Kidman listening in a concert hall to a performance of Wagner. I didn't like that movie, but I loved that Jonathan Glazer and cinematographer Harris Savides looked at, and loved, a close-up of Nicole Kidman at that moment that lasted for minutes on end. So many things you can project at that moment on the projection of her features.

"Motion capture," I fear, despite its present incredible cost, is not a singularity, not a one-off souped up for this storybook effort, but a premonition. "Emotion capture" lives in another world.

A nice point on the subject of anthropomorphism and empathy in animation ran in Friday's Guardian, in a lengthy piece by Oliver Burkeman on the world that is Pixar: "Computer animation's best human characters… are strictly symbolic representations, not lifelike creatures. And in any case, profound human emotions are not always best conveyed by the characters who appear the most human at first glance. (If you need convincing of this, compare any single appearance by Charles Schulz's endlessly complex Snoopy-animated or in strip cartoon-with the entire cinematic output of Richard Gere.)"

Hell is other Catherine Breillat movies

Catherine Breillat is much smarter than she thinks she is, and she thinks she's a really, really smart (if smutty) cookie. She talks a great game, and then she goes and makes movies and then she talks about them some more. Fat Girl (A ma soeur!) (2001) is powerful, and is her more sedate counterpart about a teenaged boy's exploitation by an older woman, Brief Crossing, (Breve Traversee) (2001)which recently debuted on DVD. Breillat's 2002 Sex is Comedy, an amusing fictional auto-critique of the shooting of the sex scenes in Fat Girl has been bouncing around the continent as well. This Friday, those who admired Romance are in for much more of the same in this year's Anatomy of Hell (*), drawn from her own novel "Pornocatie." It's graphic: sex, blood, menstrual tea and a defenseless rake handle are among the acts and objects used to enact Breillat's ideas about gender and sexuality as The Girl pays The Man (or, more accurately, The Gay Man) to "watch me where I'm unwatchable." She also tells Sight & Sound in the December issue, "After all, my film is about showing what is unwatchable." If Breillat means that as a challenge, I can at least say that I was paid to watch her where she has become unwatchable.

Irish bubblegum

The very Irish Cowboys & Angels (*** ½) is a sweet if sitcommy coming-of-age movie, and very likable. Shane (Michael Legge) is a shy 20-year-old who hates his job in the civil service who wants to go to art school; he moves into an apartment in Limerick with Vincent (Allen Leech), a gay fashion student who seems like his perfect opposite. Misunderstandings, makeovers and various romances ensue, with charm and some tough lessons about life in the big city. As it courses its city streets, Cowboys & Angels also has a virtuoso, vibrant look; in writer-director Danny Gleeson's words, the colors are "the steely blues of the coolest clubs, the velvet blacks of the darkest night and the scarlet red of the hottest kiss [challenging] the viewer not to long to be a part of it." I'll give Gleeson that.

Remote Possbilities

The terrific PBS documentary series, POV has partnered with the Docurama label, creating another outlet for the powerful, feature-length work they support. (Docurama's back catalogue includes movies like The Weather Underground.) Many of the entries play at festivals like Sundance, some get theatrical distribution, then play a few times on TV. One of the first two releases, Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk's Lost Boys of Sudan (***) played theatrically, and the DVD contains commentary, deleted scenes, and "Where are they now?" updates on the Sudanese refugees who have struggled to fit into contemporary American life.

I caught the fierce and frightening Farmingville (****), by Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini on an off afternoon when I was a judge at the Nashivle Film Festival, and wish more people could see it on the big screen. Its release on DVD is painful and painfully contemporary, examining race hatred through the story of two Mexican day laborers among about 1,500 working in and around the small town of Farmingville, New York, in the late 1990s, who were almost murdered on the basis of their race. Co-director Sandoval, who was an articulate fellow guest at the festival, is especially articulate on the subject: A lawyer by trade, has worked on immigration and refugee affairs in the past, he's of Mexican-American and Puerto Rican descent.

Takeshi Kitano, maker of the great gangster artpics Fireworks (Hani-be) (1997) and Sonatine (1993), may be an acquired taste, but he's one of the most important directors working today. Still, his tonal shifts, alternating the bumpkin comedy that he trained in onstage as well as over the years on Japanese television, with bursts of outrageous yet spatially secular acts of violence, leave some audiences befuddled or bemused at best. Which is sad, considering that in a movie like his latest has some of the most furiously inventive moments in any movie this year. Kitano's Zatoichi, retitled The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (*** ½) for U.S. release, is a riff on the long-running Japanese movie series, with twenty-six installments over the years. There are playful bits taking on several Japanese period and martial arts genre traditions, but what is most satisfying is Kitano's as-always approach to expressive violence that becomes as much a feat of graphic arts as troubling sensation. Each time the seemingly unbeatable blind Zatoichi is compelled to slide his deadly sword from his bright red blind cane, sound effects of sudden force anticipate zigs of blood and zags of geometry, the blood depicted through the use of computer generated imagery, as much bright red geysers of Japanese calligraphy as viscous life source. It's a strangely lyric and thrilling effect, and one of the most memorable features of a marvelous movie. (Although I love the needs-to-be-seen-to-be-disbelieved climactic musical number.) The extras include a making-of featurette, and interviews with the cinematographer, production designer, costume designer and master swordsman. The best, most generous bonus? The complete Sonatine (****), garnering inspired comedy from the prankish lassitude of gangsters who are forced to forever cool their heels. The DVD cover, cluttered and tacky, with a vertical box on the right hand side with red-handled sword against a yellow backdrop, purposefully recalls the graphic elements of the Kill Bill movies, with the blade slicing through a reproduction of the homely original "Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Pictures Presents" VHS box. But hey, whatever it takes to get great films to market and convince people to watch Kitano's work…

 

November16, 2004

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