Films Folded
Ted Goranson is a writer and consultant who works with structured narrative as well as other topics. Visitors may want to visit the Filmsfolding Community.
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June 19, 2009 High and Dizzy: On the Roof
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.1
DVD at Amazon
I recently saw "Hangover," and wondered why we find intoxication so universally funny. Not expecting much of an answer from anywhere, I came to this. The gimmick here is that our hero gets drunk and then follows a sleepwalking girl (who Harold later marries!).
The whole movie is a setup for them wandering out on one of those ledges that seems to only exist in movies: incredibly high, just narrow enough to walk on and accessible from double hung windows. Now I have every reason to believe that they really did perform this dangerous stunt — and it is only slightly less impressive that they were only pretending to be oblivious. Many people watching this would know that Harold blew half his hand off in a previous stunt that went wrong.
And yet, it depends on that drunk routine. It didn't seem funny, nor can I see how it ever would have, though I know it was considered hilarious. But then this was made during prohibition, roughly equal to the situation today with roofers.
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June 18, 2009 Son of Rambow: Rolls, Lightening
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.2
DVD at Amazon
Gosh, another movie that is well conceived and poorly executed, this time built around what I call folding. Storywise, it is between "Be Kind, Rewind," and "Is There?" which features the same boy actor, the same setting of an English privately run old folks' home in 80's England and the same parental issues.
Here the main fold is a movie about a kid making a movie that is based on another movie. The following is true of both the movie we see and the movie we see being made: the result is bad, but we are told that it is endearing so we are supposed to let the poor film-making pass.
The extra origami is planned to come from folding this into two other "performances." One is the roles invented and played by schoolchildren to convince themselves and each other that they matter. This comes from the bully role of the buddy who starts the movie, a situation of a preening "cool" French kid who is visiting, and what appears to be a severely cut series of episodes involving older kids and their comparatively comic roles and costumes.
The other is the notion of prescribed roles that must be played by parents, here prescribed by religious rules.
The folds as written are combined clumsily. The map to religion we "see" by visions of an imagined story that becomes the movie within, but presented as drawings superimposed on the pages of a Bible. To map to the schoolyard bits, we have similar drawings on the walls of the school. Its a bit literal, but it gets worse: when the inner movie takes off is when the role played by the French kid and his posse map into the roles in the Rambo film, the merger literally happened in a church, with some obviously deliberate staging.
And there is even a focus on watching and watches, and not one but two demented elderly watchers.
Get it? Jees. So much for the writing, but you have to give the writer-director credit for also working on folding these elements in the cinematic sense. There are transitions between "real life" and the various inner roles and stories. Unfortunately, this visual overlapping is done with two distinctly different kinds of animation, neither of which match the various forms of drawings from the boy through whose eyes we see all this.
If I had an annotation tool that pointed to scenes, I could show how all this tries to work and could have with a bit more visual coherence.
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June 15, 2009 Up: Falls
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8.9
DVD at Amazon
Pixar has its first truly Disney project.
It has all the hallmarks of the Pixal manual: it is obsessed with exploring the third dimension and it has an extremely refined engineering of story. It touches on thoroughly conventional family values in a slightly new way. And it has a strangely relevant short that precedes it.
In this case, the three dimensional explorations that Pixar mastered are rendered in visual three D because Disney's corporate strategy requires it. Its a massive shame. That's because of the unintuitive fact that of all the exploration and innovation that Pixar has done has to do with novelties of the projection into a 2-d screen with a frame. The frame , usually constrained by the physics of the camera, has a broader physics in Pixar-land. But to get audiences to "read" the 3D, these extended physics are taken away and what we have is ordinary camera movement and framing.
I may have a different experience when I see this in 2D, but I think not. All the cinematic fun, the adventure of the Pixar spirit, is missing here.
The one thing that is outside the normal Pixar range is the color palette. It much richer here than usual. I think that may have also to do with Disney strategies for dealing with technology threats.
The child here is Asian. That's also a market driven decision.
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June 14, 2009 Watchmen: One Man, One Watch
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 8
DVD at Amazon
This to my taste is another clumsy deal: centered on an existing product, the attempts at being visually coherent should be more successful than they are. Its a mess, visually and rhythmically.
There are two things that impressed me though.
I thought the "Rorschach" character was very successful, in part because he pushed a strong path through the chaos that was both the world of the movie and the movie. He was fully integrated: story, bearing, visuals, including some of the setups. Its baffling to me how everyone else would be so clearly inferior in execution. This idea of having a "mask" (which is basically just a headsock) that forms dynamic blots — it is genius.
The other thing, dear reader, is something of a personal quirk. I have a fascination with orreries. These are — originally — models of the solar system that were by gears and tracks, novel machinery of different types, supposed to model the movement of at least the planets. As an student of modeling and abstraction, these have a historical significance for me, and I find that they have become a sort of minor but very strong icon in film.
Here we have one, a modern type. It is almost a perfect blend of Superman's crystal fort in the first movie, and the "device" in "Contact." We are supposed to believe that this is the perfect creation of a perfect mind, one that can see everything in how it works and can model it in such a way that it controls those forces. It is, thus, a model of himself, everything he knows and his transit and container. There is a plot point where the lover's emotions destroy is by simply existing, but that is another story.
I loved the design of the thing; its just marvelous. These three dimensional model- environments just thrill me. I wanted to recommend "Knowing" just based on the stellated spaceship alone. This is so much more laden with visual mysticism.
Try to sit through this mess for the successful character and this orrery.
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