In Confidence

I *think* I’m allowed to talk about this, as long as I don’t say anything…

First, I’m sorry for not mentioning it sooner, but I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement and I don’t want to betray the trust placed in me. A few months ago, producer David Brown came to me with an intriguing proposition: a big film he was involved in (he line-produces big films) was seeking a little help. There was a sequence in the film involving a media sensation, and so the film required lots of little bits, short segments that might be news items, discussion shows, YouTube clips, anything which could be bundled together, possibly with split-screen, to suggest a media furore. Rather than create all this stuff with a full feature film crew at vast expense, the makers of the film thought it would be fun, and nice, to give the job to a bunch of film students and see what they came up with.

Since I teach part-time at Edinburgh College of Art and I know David, I was the conduit. But of course I wanted to get in on the act, so I volunteered to direct a little segment myself.

So now, me and a bunch of students from ECA and also Napier Screen Academy have contributed little segments, mostly around twenty seconds, some of which have been used in the final edit, of CLOUD ATLAS, the new film from Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. Here they are —

Wonderful to finally have Lana Wachowski in the spotlight, by the way. I think she’ll be an inspirational role model. There aren’t that many high profile transgender people. I’m not counting Michael Cimino because (1) Who knows what’s going on there and (2) High profile?

Now, I haven’t seen CLOUD ATLAS but I’m excited to do so, not just for my twenty second bit, which will probably be split-screened with a lot of other material, even if it’s visible in its entirety. I’m psyched about the whole film, for its astonishing ambition.

Visible in the trailer is my pal Niall Fulton (screen right at 2:27), who was in CRY FOR BOBO as the policeman who gets the bucket of water on his head. And the rest of the cast is a remarkable bunch — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent…

Now I must read the book.

The False Good Idea

It’s one of my favourite concepts in film-making, the False Good Idea, and I’m indebted to producer David Brown for introducing me to it. Of course, some would say that a False Good Idea is just the same as a True Bad Idea, which is hardly a new concept, but the beauty of the phrase for me is how it encapsulates the glitter and appeal of the FGI, the thing which is presented as good, accepted as good, and leads us all to hell.

The FGI in Oliver Stone’s ALEXANDER is the principle of historical accuracy in costumes (big nappies all round) with bright, crisp, clear sunlight, exposing the full ludicrousness of the proceedings.

The guy who edited the excellent trailer for Stone’s W. identified the FGI in that one as, “Who wants to see a fair and balanced portrait of George W Bush by Oliver Stone?” The neo-con audience would avoid the film because it’s Stone, who is the anti-Christ. Stone’s admirers would avoid the film if they thought it was a whitewash. What was needed was a Michael Moore approach, playing to Stone’s percieved strengths as a maker of chaotic, pop-art satires like NATURAL BORN KILLERS (a film I despise, personally) . With NIXON, the idea of humanizing the Devil was a more interesting way to go, and the greater historical distance obviated any need for messianic urgency, but W. could and should have been a genuinely political film from a passionately held viewpoint.

Accompanying the film’s weakness on politics is an aesthetic weakness — too many scenes of Sedentary Characters in Plush Rooms, without any interesting cinematic angle on what to DO with S.C.s in P.R.s (if Stone can’t create chaos by mixing film stocks and flying around moving characters, he’s rather emasculated as a director) — and a problem of character. Stone has said that he admires Bush for conquering his addictions and the aimless lifestyle of his youth. Of course, an ability to overcome ones demons is admirable, although I do wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off had Bish not drunk himself to death (actually, I don’t wonder: I’m pretty sure we would be). And Stone can relate to Bush’s battle, which is fair enough. But I actually think being harsher on Bush would have been a better course for Stone, since if the film is to some small extent a veiled depiction of his own journey through hedonism to achievement, it doesn’t do to be too indulgent. My favourite character in NATURAL BORN KILLERS was Robert Downey Jnr’s documentarist, mainly because he seemed like a Stone surrogate in part, supplying a degree of distance in a film otherwise jammed much too far up itself.

I watched W. during our teen-watching week. It’s a largely dull film, and a dull script — as in THE DOORS, Stone seems incapable of shame even when serving up the eggiest lines of exposition of the “This is the sixties,” variety. Jumping around in Bush’s life serves no good purpose — it’s not even chaotic enough to serve Stone’s craving for “energy”, especially with explanatory titles supered up to locate each scene in space-time. But there are a couple of pleasures.

The starry cast serves to illustrate the adage that “Politics is showbusiness for ugly people,” — every actor in the film is better-looking than the personage they’re playing. Yet Thandie Newton, transfigured by makeup, does an astounding, terrifying job of embodying the walking madness known as Condoleeza Rice. The other highlight is Toby Jones, whose Karl Rove is likewise a creature of hallucination — in these scenes, Stone sometimes gets close to a kind of Strangelovian nightmare comedy (directly referenced in the war room set — see also WATCHMEN), partly because it’s impossible to evoke those personalities convincingly without tipping the film over into the realms of CALIGARI. And one scene, in which Bush tells his pastor of his intention of running for president, actually achieves a rather magnificent wit — although I couldn’t be sure if this was accidental, given the leaden writing and direction elsewhere.

Josh Brolin’s GWB is backlit in heavenly fashion during the scene, which isn’t the witty part, although it made me smile very slightly. But Toby Jones, arranging himself in the background like a truncated python that’s swallowed a goat, is. As Bush talks of the God that’s inspired him, Jones’s preening postures and smug expression make us feel that he IS that God. Which puts the candidate’s faith in a whole new light. What’s even funnier is that nobody else in the scene appears to be able to see him.

Previous Film Syndrome

Weakening at last, Fiona and I trotted along to our local megagooglegigaplex to see THE DARK NIGHT, and against expectations, rather enjoyed it. As far as the weaknesses go, David Bordwell expresses it pretty-near perfectly in this post on his astounding blog.

What surprised me pleasantly was how visually coherent it was. BATMAN BEGINS annoyed the seven hecks out of me with it’s illegible, chaotic fight scenes, shot with a long lens on a wobblecam and edited by a crack team of epileptic speed-freaks with a digital bacon-slicer. Christopher Nolan, perhaps history’s most boring human, has droned at length about the purpose behind this “plan” — since he was introducing Batman to the audience and to the criminals he’s battering the lungs out of, he wanted a sense of not quite being able to catch how fast and effective this guy is. Nolan, as INSOMNIA showed, is a gifted guy with a weakness for the False Good Idea, as producer David Brown calls it (in INSOMNIA the F.G.I. was to cut very rapidly to give a sense of sleep-deprived Al Pacino’s disorientation. Of course the effect was headache inducing and indistinguishable from very poor filmmaking, causing me to wonder if Nolan was just trying to protect a bad central performance: was Pacino back on the sauce?). In BATBEG the F.G.I. was the assumption that we’d be more interested in getting a sense of the bad guys’ perspective than we would be in WATCHING THE ACTION in what’s supposed to be AN ACTION MOVIE.

What puzzled me at the time was how nobody seemed to mind: I can’t recall any critics mentioning this rather unusual, extreme approach (which pre-dates Paul Greengrass’s action fiascoes with the BOURNE series). I guess somebody probably did, but I read a bunch of reviews and was still surprised when I saw the movie. Theory: critics were so surprised at the film’s contrasting approach to the Joel Schumacher dayglo roller-disco BATMAN AND ROBIN, they shut down most of their faculties to prevent neural overload.

Fast-forward to right now, and scarcely a review fails to mention the incoherence of Nolan’s action scenes in DARK KNIGHT. Yet the film is not particularly fast-cut, by modern action movie standards, and only twice did I have any trouble following what was happening. (1) The truck chase, which has some impressive stuff but goes on so long it outlasted my ability to concentrate on BIG THINGS CRASHING INTO EACH OTHER and (b) a brief skirmish in Eric Roberts’ (Yay! Eric Roberts!) night-club, where the strobe lighting and a fairly clear Roberts’ POV make it obvious that the incoherence is an intentional effect, and I didn’t mind it.

What’s going on, of course, is the title of this post. Reviewers have caught up with their misgivings about the previous film, and are now pouring them over this one. Some filmmakers have actually said that reviewers ALWAYS review the previous film, although I think it’s at least as common for them to attack a current film for not doing what the preceding one did. I first noticed this when leafing through old issues of the Monthly Film Bulletin, and then elsewhere. Reviews of Richard Lester’s elegiac ROBIN AND MARIAN were kicking it for not being as funny as his THE FOUR MUSKETEERS. Turning to a previous issue, I found reviewers of THE FOUR MUSKETEERS smacking it around for not being as funny as THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Now, since M4 has a somewhat tragic ending, it’s just possible that this lessening of belly-laughs was intentional. Since ROBIN AND MARIAN has a totally tragic ending (maybe the original title, THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD, would have helped) and very few jokes, most of them early on, it should have been apparent that humour was less central this time round. But no. “Nothing to laugh at at all,” moaned Leslie Halliwell.

It should just be a warning to anybody looking at a movie, to look at it clean, without projecting another movie on top. I’m certain I’ve been guilty of this myself, but giving the syndrome a name, with a catchy abbreviation — P.M.S. — may help avoid it.

As for THE DARK KNIGHT, it’s far from perfect, but of course Heath Ledger is scarifically grand (you can see him thinking, Imagine if Brad Dourif had too much saliva…) and Aaron Eckhart, in his Two-Face mode, looks like Kirk Douglas cartooned by Basil Wolverton. Which is an agreeably eccentric choice in a film that seems to be at pains to avoid any trace of comic-bookiness.