Category / Film

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Juan José Campanella & Allison Amend II

Juan José Campanella and Allison Amend both appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #331.

Mr. Campanella is most recently the co-writer and director of The Secret in Their Eyes, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and opens in theaters on April 16, 2010.

Ms. Amend is most recently the author of Stations West and previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #256.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for Old West secrets in various eyes.

Guests: Juan José Campanella and Allison Amend

Subjects Discussed: Devising a stadium shot that’s a hybrid between Touch of Evil and Black Sunday, stitching shots together through CGI, using Massive Software, contending with how details change between 1974 and 2010, expressive focal lengths, lava lamps that isn’t replaced over decades, hippie actors who are ideal to play authoritarian judges, piles and piles of paper, the myth of the paperless office, creating a train station through CGI, the steps you need to take to ensure that fake walls aren’t seen by daytime courthouse workers, sports statistics, working with novelist Eduardo Sacheri, why novelists are especially suited to screenplay collaboration, philosophical questions about one man having a singular passion, the best way to look for someone who has disappeared, Campanella’s non-cinematic passions, the tormented eight year creative process of turning a story into a novel, how one does the “find an agent dance,” true sex vs. sexy sex, the role of women in early patriarchal America, questions of “commercial appeal,” prejudice against women in the publishing industry, the Stephen Crane principle of writing about what you don’t experience, anonymous peer reviews of novels at university presses, believability and research, Pullman cars, getting accustomed to thinking about a world without present technology, requirements it takes to be a train enthusiast, Stations West‘s early version as a “Forrest Gump novel,” Harvey House restaurants, internal rhyme, Zima, overwriting, pesky adjectives and adverbs, comparative measurements, eugenics and multiculturalism, Lamarckian descriptions and the American melting pot, Pinckney Benedict, historical precedent with character names, mythical bureaucratic forms, delving too much into census records, getting accurate historical dialogue, talking a ton, the strategy of removed narrators, The Jews of Oklahoma, violence and death, unexpected deaths in history and narrative, train accidents, the glee of killing animals in fiction, and the role of the misunderstood in history.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: The wonderful marvelous stadium shot that’s in the middle of this movie — it’s a hybrid of Black Sunday and Touch of Evil.

Campanella: Yes, exactly.

Correspondent: The question. I mean, obviously, I would love to ask you how you did this. But I’m also really curious how you got all these people in the stadium. I mean, I don’t know what your budgetary scenario was.

Campanella: Well, the budget was very low. As you know, it’s a national Argentine movie. So we don’t have millions of dollars to do it. And we did it with the help of a few buttons and chips and stuff.

Correspondent: Aha! The wonderful CGI.

Campanella: Some of it is CGI. Some of it is real. You never know what is what. Because we interspersed it. So it wouldn’t look like a PlayStation game. But also, you know, most of the work was done not in populating the stadium, but in stitching the shots together. To make it look like one continuous take and to make you feel like we were throwing you from a helicopter into the bleachers, and then chasing the guy together with our heroes.

Correspondent: So the actual crowd. How many extras was that?

Campanella: About 300.

Correspondent: And you just basically composited over and over again.

Campanella: Well, no, it’s more involved with that. Because for the regular composition shot — we call it compleción in Spanish — you need to have the camera locked. And the camera’s moving here all the time. It’s a handheld shot with a lot of crazy movement. We’re actually in an avalanche of people at one point. Trying to keep ourselves standing. So no, no, you cannot do the compleción trick. No, it involves the Massive software. It’s called Massive. It was developed for Lord of the Rings. It’s a very involved work. It’s a very crafty work. That’s another thing. People think that if you get the software, you can do it. And it’s not like that. This is the same thing as if I give you a brush and oil paint, and you paint the Mona Lisa. It’s not like that. You need real artists to pull it off.

Correspondent: Got it. It’s not just a bunch of monkey typing Shakespeare. A million monkeys.

Campanella: (laughs) Exactly.

* * *

Correspondent: You clearly did not settle into the Old West or can foods or run a store.

Amend: No.

Correspondent: At least not to my knowledge.

Amend: I did work at a hot dog stand once.

Correspondent: I’m curious how much invention went into this and how much you were concerned about getting verisimilitude with this. The 80 year epoch that you explore.

Amend: I was originally not particularly concerned with either of those things. I had to do a lot of research just to know even what I was dealing with. And then I went randomly to hear E.L. Doctorow speak. The king of setting books in historical settings. And he said, “Oh, you don’t do research. Just make it up. You’ve seen enough TV and watched enough movies. You’ll probably get it right. And if not, someone will tell you.” Which is easy for him to say. Because he has seven paid research assistants. But that was really liberating. And I thought, “You know, I have seen enough old Westerns. And I’ve been to Oklahoma. I’ll just write the book.” And the truth is that there’s no plot twist that hinges on an invention that hadn’t been invented yet. Everything is changeable.

And for a while there in the middle, I was working with the University of Oklahoma Press. And they had it read by a historian of Oklahoma, who tore the book to shreds. He’s like, “Well, I couldn’t get past Page 5. Because the author says the landscape is very arid. And that part of Oklahoma is actually very lush.” Therefore this book can’t be considered as a legitimate work. And I said, “Okay, cross out ‘arid.’ Insert the word ‘lush.'” It doesn’t change the character development.

Correspondent: Who is this guy?

Amend: He was anonymous. Because he was a peer reviewer. Which is part of the problem with university presses.

Correspondent: I noticed that there was a reference to him in the acknowledgments.

Amend: Yes. That’s actually not him. That was a very wonderful editor who subsequently died of stomach cancer. Which is very sad. But the reviewer in question was known as “Mr. Grouchy Pants.” And I do not know who he is. And if he’s hearing this interview, I changed “arid” to “lush.” Most easy.

Correspondent: Did he set up an anonymous email account? Did he telephone you?

Amend: Oh no. It was like a five page report that he sent to the editor, who then forwarded it to me.

Correspondent: With mysterious initials at the end?

Amend: Yeah, I know.

Correspondent: Wow. That’s how they do things over there.

Amend: Yeah. Well, you know, it was a university press. So the procedure there is that everything goes through a peer review. Which makes a lot of sense if you’re publishing a textbook or a piece of scholarship. Less sense…

Correspondent: (laughs) …if you’re publishing a novel.

Amend: If you’re publishing fiction.

Correspondent: Wow.

Amend: Yeah. But they could not seem to get beyond that step.

Correspondent: This is probably the craziest editing process that you’ve gone through, I would guess.

Amend: Oh. For sure. Although my path through the publishing world has been non-traditional. Let’s put it that way.

Correspondent: I mean, I can’t even imagine working with an editor who’s speaking behind — like Charlie’s Angels or something.

Amend: Yeah, it really was. Like a box on the wall.

Correspondent: Behind the red door.

The Bat Segundo Show #331: Juan Jose Campanella & Allison Amend II(Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Review: Clash of the Titans (2010)

Even as a lad, I was not a fan of the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. A grade school teacher, detecting some faint whiff of precocity, suggested that I needed to investigate Roman mythology. Not wishing to disappoint her, I checked out a 200-page book on Roman mythology from the school library. It contained striking illustrations and offered a kid-friendly overview of the gods. I spent several days alone in my bedroom, reading it over and over with more devotion than any variation on the King James Bible. Some of my mother’s wild-eyed friends, sensing that I was an uncommon reader, attempted to get me to read more ecumenical texts. But I was suspicious of these gestures. I didn’t understand then why one needed to choose a religion. If you had to select one, why not place your faith in these marvelous stories? Medusa! Cerberus! Narcissus! Prometheus! The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice! These tales all captured my imagination so much that I found myself flipping through the Yellow Pages, wondering if there were any churches devoted to Zeus or Aphrodite.

Seeing no division for “Roman” or “Greek,” I nervously telephoned a few churches when my mother was away, asking where one could go to worship the gods. One man told me that surely I meant a singular one. “No, no, no,” I replied. “I’m talking about the Gods of Olympus!” There were efforts to steer me towards the “true” faith, but I proved recalcitrant. I concluded that religion was not for me, but I still begrudgingly went to church when I was asked and I did my best to keep my mouth shut. Although one congregation member would later say, “There’s something of the devil in that boy.” For all I knew, he was probably right.

So when the Clash of the Titans lunchboxes started showing up in the cafeteria, and when some of the kids began speaking of this “great” film, and when I continued to wonder about the mechanical bird (who reminded me of Tick Tock from the Oz books), I felt obliged to figure out a way to see this movie. I knew the name “Ray Harryhausen” from the amazing stop-motion effects seen in the Sinbad movies that repeatedly aired on UHF stations. And while the Medusa sequence impressed me, the Perseus depicted in Clash (played by a doe-eyed Harry Hamlin) reminded me of the sleazy and self-absorbed men — some strange phase between disco king and yuppie — who drove loud sportscars when I looked out the car window. This Perseus couldn’t possibly compare to the one I had imagined from the books. What was the big deal?

So it’s safe to say that the original Clash didn’t make much of an impression. And now that I’ve had the misfortune of revisiting the original film, I can safely say that it contains very little of value aside from Harryhausen’s effects. Even with the prominent matte lines and the inconsistent lighting between the animation and the live action, Harryhausen remained a consummate master of the tiny gesture that spelled out everything you needed to know about a creature. The specific way that Pegasus kicks up his forelegs or the manner in which the giant hawk waits for Andromeda’s soul to enter the cage. And, most impressively, the way that the Kraken burrowed his three claws into the rocks and peeked his menacing head over the ravine. This attention to detail made these seemingly one-dimensional characters live in my mind.

So it is my sad duty to report that the Clash remake, while not nearly as terrible as I expected, doesn’t possess a singular creature gesture to match Harryhausen’s. Gargoyles flap about into a giant mass. There are a few giant scorpions that prove somewhat enthralling. Pegasus, who is referred to not as “Pegasus, the last of the flying horses” (as he was in the original) but merely “the Pegasus” (well, if he isn’t unique, then what’s the big deal?), has been integrated, by way of jet hide, into some strange affirmative action program. It’s clear that the animators are inputting coordinates into a computer. The time for careful attention to monsters is now mostly finished.

Which is too bad. Because Sam Worthington is better as Perseus than that dreadful slab of inexpressive meat (the suitably named Hamlin) cast in the original. While there’s something more than a bit odd about seeing a 33-year-old actor referred to as “boy,” and Worthington appears remiss to show off his pecs in the exhibitionist manner that Hamlin (or director Desmond Davis) was all too eager to practice, Worthington is never insufferable. Alas, his Perseus is less committed to taking charge. He bitches about going back to his old life as a fisherman. He is never given an invisible helmet, as he was in the original, much less a shield from the gods.

Instead of Burgess Meredith, Perseus is accompanied by two mercenaries, who speak some bad dialect that is vaguely Russian and vaguely Slavic, but ultimately the product of lazy Hollywood acting. (When this duo first appears, the film is quick to insert some gypsy music track, as if we won’t notice just how terrible they are. All that money for the effects and the filmmakers couldn’t hire a dialect coach?) Indeed, one of this movie’s curious qualities is that there is no uniform dialect. Some actors speak with an Australian dialect; others, Santa Monica; still others, British. And this slipshod attention to language should give you a sense of where director Lewis Leterrier’s priorities are.

Perseus is constantly under the tutelage of Io (played by the inexpressive Gemma Arterton), who has been watching him all his life. (Never mind that we don’t see her until midway through the film.)

In other words, 2010’s Perseus reflects the vitiated masculinity often found in the insufferable hipster too intoxicated with his own indolence.

But that’s the least of the film’s problems. Given that the original film featured Ursula Andress’s ass and a breastfeeding moment, I was surprised that the remake’s eleventh-hour upgrade to 3-D (reportedly assembled in eight weeks) didn’t take advantage of these Z-axis possibilities. It becomes very clear early on that this movie was never designed with 3-D in mind, and that audiences are being gouged. Clash‘s 3-D “experience” merely involves accentuating planes of focus. One would get livelier surprises from a pop-up book. And the film’s reticence to display blood and visceral fluids (much less the nude form) makes one wonder how this movie landed a PG-13 rating. Yes, there’s a scene in which Perseus cuts his way out of the inside of a computer-generated scorpion. But it all seemed artificial to me. Not just because the film never lets a creature have even ten seconds of camera time to offer some personality, but because we are never given a gesture in which we can believe in the scorpion.

I should probably also mention the remake’s casual misogyny, which comes courtesy of screenwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi. The original film, you may recall, was somewhat careful with the gender balance. There was Thetis’s statue that came alive. Athena and Aphrodite were given some moments. When Perseus declared that he was going to pursue the Stygian witches on his own, Andromeda stood her ground, saying, “No, we will ride with you as far as their shrine. It is a long and perilous journey.” And when Perseus busted out some macho swagger, Andromeda pushed back. Then, with a schmaltzy music cue from Laurence Rosenthal, Andromeda rode forth with her horse, shortly announcing, “We follow the North Star.”

This may not have been much, but at least the women in the original Clash got the chance to engage in a little action. By contrast, the remake has pushed all the goddesses out of the narrative, leaving only Zeus (Liam Nesson) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes) to duke it out with humans as pawns. In the remake, Andromeda doesn’t accompany Perseus on his quest. And it isn’t too long before Io, in a preposterous moment aboard Charon’s ferry, soon becomes little more than a sex object, urging Perseus to “ease your storm.” And it was here that the film lost me. Granted, defenders of this remake (will there be any?) will no doubt respond to my criticisms by pointing out that Io tries to teach Perseus some moves to battle Medusa. But Io never makes any real effort to put Perseus in his place. The film’s anti-women attitude can also be found in the Medusa sequence. Medusa, in the original, was an ass-kicking serpent who fired arrows at Perseus’s comrades. She was a formidable villainess whose omnipresent rattle was enough to command attention. But in the remake, all Medusa does is offer random laughs and slither around her lair. And if that isn’t enough for you, consider the needless explanation for Medusa’s transformation in both films. The original simply mentioned that Aphrodite punished her. The remake offers a description of rape, painting Medusa as a once very beautiful woman. It’s almost as if the filmmakers are suggesting that the bitch had it coming.

So if some kid is coming into this movie, hoping to find some halfway house with which to move onto the likes of Edith Hamilton, then the Clash remake is mostly futile. As my pal Eric Rosenfield was adamant to observe, the film doesn’t even get the mythology right. (Perseus does not marry Andromeda in this movie.) It doesn’t even have the decency to give us Dioskilos, the cool two-headed dog that Perseus’s army fought before Medusa. It does wisely divest itself of Bubo, the mechanical bird from the original, giving it, quite literally, a throwaway cameo. And again, I cannot stress enough how anticlimactic the 3-D is.

I’ve seen movies that are worse. But when you’re dealing with mythological wonder, why settle for less?

by Edward Champion

On the Cannibal Film Genre

There’s some more content coming (indeed, there will be a good deal of content published tomorrow). But in the meantime, I feel compelled to direct your attention to this morning’s Barnes & Noble Review, where my essay on the cannibal film genre has just run. What happened here is that my editor had me review a film. Then, knowing very well of my tendency (indeed, one could more accurately style it a full-blown obsessive commitment) of performing serious background research, I began watching a good deal of cannibal films. And so this rather unusual cannibal film essay emerged in its place. You can read the results here. Here are the first few sentences:

The cannibal film, much like its topical larder, may be the genre of last resort. But open-minded cineastes wishing to move beyond Hannibal Lecter’s fey gravitas may be surprised to find an edgy contextual reframing that mainstream cinema lacks the guts to approach.

by Edward Champion

New Directors/New Films: Beautiful Darling (2010)

[This is the second in a series of dispatches relating to the New Directors/New Films series, running between March 24, 2010 and April 4, 2010 at MOMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.]

“You must always be yourself, no matter what the price.” — Candy Darling’s diary

Candy Darling — born James L. Slattery — was arguably the most intriguing of Andy Warhol’s fearless thespians. She was not only talented enough to dupe The New York Times‘s critical acumen (“this is the first impersonation of a female impersonator I have ever seen,” read one of the Gray Lady’s reviews), but she inspired Lou Reed to write one of his most famous songs and Tennessee William wrote Small Craft Warnings for her. But was Darling, who died of lymphoma at the needlessly young age of 29, truly herself even while charming the thriving New York art scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s?

A fascinating new documentary, Beautiful Darling, produced by Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton, doesn’t entirely answer this question. But it does offer an invaluable perspective on what it was like to struggle as a transsexual during that time. If the film errs on the side of cautious hagiography, it atones for this understandable partisanship by highlighting some too easily forgotten truths, pointing to certain liberties and folkways now taken for granted. Female impersonation was a dangerous criminal charge during the time, considered an indecent aberration that was doggedly upheld by the police. Drag queens were forced to carry their sartorial bundles during the day and change clandestinely within buildings. The empowering compromise one could get away with, as identified in the film by Agosto Machado, was “a little mascara and a mohair coat.” Triumphant bon vivants would happily shout the name of Gay Street at the intersection of Christopher. New York, now a less tolerant playground for the rich, was then considered, as Fran Lebowitz suggests in the film, “a place for people who couldn’t fit in. People who actually did something that nobody was interested in.” Speed was heavily ingested. Bohos and misfits were often forced to find their meals at parties thrown by the affluently curious, taking home the remains for tomorrow’s lunch.

Darling thrived within this harsh yet permissive climate, attracting a league of potential dates and hanging out in the permissive backroom of Max’s Kansas City, where the squares couldn’t make it past the velvet rope. But the seeds for this twentysomething transformation were sown in Massapequa Park, Long Island, where a young Darling waded through movie magazines, spent an entire day staring at a Kim Novak photo, and endured a nearly soul-crushing wave of isolation. In Beautiful Darling, the diary entries — the words solipsistic but uncompromising — are read by Chloe Sevigny. One harrowing photo that accompanies these narrations, showing a pre-Darling Slattery with a painful look on his face, his arm gripped by his mother, is more than enough to convey a sad backstory. Thankfully, additional details are filled in beyond these primary sources. Aside from the film’s many interviews, which include numerous Factory acolytes and Warhol’s decidedly unnerved former secretary, by Newton’s many interviews in the mid-1970s, conducted after Darling’s death. We learn that Darling’s mother married another man who was anti-gay. An anonymous Long Island acquaintance declares her hatred for Darling, once she saw her adopting her truer identity.

But was Darling’s identity genuine? Or some compromise? The film delicately tiptoes over these questions, but it does point to Warhol’s eventual abandonment of Darling so that he can cash in on the forthcoming yuppie-fueled lucre. He later proved, as one former associate puts it, more interested in selling ads for Interview. Darling declares in her diary, “I’m not a genuine woman. But I’m not interested in genuineness.” Yet Darling was driven to Warhol as a genuine benefactor. The Factory’s obsessiveness with pop culture served as a vital surrogate for Hollywood, even if the remunerative pickings were slim (merely $25 to appear in a Warhol scene). There seemed no other place for Darling to thrive. But she was dogged enough to make this difficult situation work, even after being shunned by Warhol. She proudly boasted that she collected no money and would crash on friends’ couches, sleeping until six or seven at night.

“I must conquer New York or be conquered,” wrote Darling in her diaries. It was a daring ultimatum that seems unthinkable for most artists of her type today. After seeing this film, I wondered what Darling would have made of herself had she lived longer. Would she have been co-opted by marketing forces during the Reagan years? Would she have been shunned further? Darling claimed that she wanted to be loved, but one wonders whether the pop cultural construct and the tolerance would have expired. Beautiful Darling works so well because of the way it quietly reveals the unforgiving characters within alternative culture. If you write off or forget the misunderstood, or you’re too busy designing soup cans or collecting corporate revenue, are you really all that different from a narrow-minded stockbroker?

by Edward Champion

New Directors/New Films: Amer (2009)

[This is the first in a series of dispatches relating to the New Directors/New Films series, running between March 24, 2010 and April 4, 2010 at MOMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.]

Young filmmakers must start from somewhere. But if an excitable yeoman merely copies his masters (or “lesser” artists openly admired), can the new film be called original? It’s a question I’ve been pondering after seeing Amer, a feature-length homage to giallo with an aggressive sound mix, a commitment to crazed closeups and Ginsu-style cutting, and a panache for primitive semiotics that serve as crass conceptual catnip for wild-eyed film nerds. Yes, filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have demonstrated that they can mimic Dario Argento’s gel-centric lighting. They have paid attention to the way that Mario Bava has cut with cars and motorcycles. Like every film student on the planet, they have seen Un Chien Andeliou. But do they really have anything new or fresh to say? Not really. Amer essentially amounts to a one-note exercise predicated on an extremely silly worldview in which women must battle against relentless male leers and a neverending storehouse of internal sexual desire. This is certainly a cartoonish viewpoint reflected by giallo, but giallo, for all of its faults, at least permits us a few human moments within its pulpish framework. Amer, by contrast, contains such a preposterously intense energy that I’m not entirely certain that the filmmakers intended this as a parody.

Amer is so determined to bombard us with its ADD cutting style that we’re left to admire the style, but scoff at the crepe-thin substance. My bullshit detector pinged off the charts. Cattet and Forzani’s failure to stretch beyond mere homage, to back up their hungry energy with an offering that makes us feel something, is what ultimately makes this flick more of a calling card for Madison Avenue. This young duo would be more at home directing vacuous Calvin Klein commercials.

The film is centered around Ana, who is depicted here as a girl, a teenager, and a woman. Amer‘s early images, with Ana as the girl, are the most promising. There are numerous eyes in extreme closeup — spastic pupils peering through keyholes, eyes contained in jewelry, and a dead man’s eyes that won’t stay shut. Mysterious glass shards are found beneath a bed. There’s a trunk bundled with limitless dolls. Viscous fluid, which we later learn from a ridiculous bathtub masturbation scene is of a magical realist and sexual nature, rains down on Ana as she attempts to navigate through a decaying palazzo laden with endless horrors, including some creepy figure in a black veil. Given all this imagination, we expect some motivation, something that extends beyond facile formalism. At this early point in the flick, Cattet and Forzani had me spellbound. I was eager to escape into this imaginative world. Until I became very aware that this was little more than a Suspiria knockoff. Then the images began to stretch horizontally, eventually moving into the next sequence of Ana as a teenager, walking along a road and holding her mother’s hand. The camera continued to objectify the young woman’s body with extreme closeups. Diaphanous outlines of her body contained in a purple skirt. The mother undoing her top button. Little dialogue. Yeah, I get it. Here we have a one-dimensional woman to be ogled by the camera. A knowing tribute to exploitation in which sequences are needlessly padded out. (Indeed, one scene involving a walk through the woods, in which various branches grope at Ana’s clothes as a battered shutter is banged about by the wind, proved so interminable that I wondered if I should slip into the restroom and relieve myself.)

Did this really need to be feature length? With all the frenetic cutting, I began to feel very sorry for the actors, who surely could not have had much to contribute to a film featuring few shots longer than a second. Indeed, the film’s editing proved so rapid-fire that it made Tony Scott look like David Lean.

And all this for an homage to giallo, complete with Stelvio Cipriani music cues. But why bother with the copy when there was the great life within the original? And why go to the trouble of making a movie that merely served to repeat, but that wasn’t willing to give us even a minimal human moment?

Homage is a tricky tightrope. As Peter Bondanella has observed in his book-length overview of Italian cinema, Pasolini’s early films paid homage to an early neorealist heritage. Classical art and music accompanied Pasolini’s gritty depictions of downtrodden criminals, and this juxtaposition, predicated upon the triumphant proletariat, permitted Pasolini to later get in touch with the personal and more daring style that he is known for today. But what Pasolini was doing with such films as Accattone and The Gospel was hardly muddled mimesis. Accattone‘s titular hero, for example, emerged as an inverted Christ figure, with the class trappings replaced by oppressive religious forces. These larger concerns allowed Pasolini to escape the mimetic yoke and emerge as an unforgettable filmmaker.

But I felt no such promise with Cattet and Forzani. These are hollow technicians who have seen too many films. Artistic vessels who don’t seem even remotely interested in what it is to be human. I longed for the likes of György Pálfi. But they’ve managed to con the festival circuit with their empty spectacle. Film geeks will rejoice. The rest of us hang our heads in disappointment.