The totally heterosexual Ricky Martin.

Yeah, I know the photo's old. So what?

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I saw this film for the first time on the opening night of its theatrical run here in Australia. I was with a group of hardcore Indiana Jones fans, all of whom emerged from the screening bitterly disappointed. I didn't actually hear anyone say 'Lucas/Spielberg raped my childhood', but the sentiment hung in the air like a bad smell as the group dispersed. I couldn't fathom the strength of the emotions on display - I mean, I love Raiders of the Lost Ark as much as the next guy, but it seemed to me that the greatest crime Crystal Skull committed was to have the downright affrontery to be a fun time at the cinema. I was certainly much more entertained than by the first viewing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I've since found that a good way to easily enrage people at dinner parties is to say that I didn't mind this film - I don't even need to use strong language, like I 'liked' or even 'loved' the film. Professing anything but a profound and burning hatred for Ang Lee's Hulk (a film I actually do love) elicits a similar response.

Last night I rented the film on Blu-ray for a second viewing, and I remain an unrepentant fan. Sure, the film has issues - for every scene (and there are many) that looks like it could have come from one of the old films, there's a scene where cinematographer Janusz Kaminski is obviously uncomfortable shoe-horning his own visual style through an anamorphic lens. And there's something a little off about the way Karen Allen is brought into the film only to be promptly sidelined again and again, as though there's a faint air of embarrassment about the fact that she hasn't kept her physique up, Madonna style. And after the film gets away with a terrific jungle chase sequence by the skin of its teeth, there's a sense of 'we pulled that off, now we can do anything' - the only possible explanation for throwing our heroes over three increasingly gigantic waterfalls and having them emerge shaken but unharmed. And then having John Hurt regain his wits at the last minute, seemingly with the single purpose of having him repeatedly remind the audience that the creatures in the climax are not from outer space, but from another dimension. Not that that little nugget of information makes any difference to most audience members' incredulity.

This last one is popular at dinner parties too - the notion that aliens and flying saucers can pop up in the Indiana Jones universe is the cause of blinding rage in people who never had a problem with a man's beating heart being ripped out, leaving him alarmed but still alive (though not for long), in Temple of Doom. Obviously there are rules about where one draws the line that I am not privy to, as having swallowed one, I have no trouble accepting the other. Sure, the film sometimes coasts along on the enormous amount of goodwill generated from the reunion of Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, but it offers too many treats for me to be surly about the bum notes and crap bits (Shia LeBeouf swinging from the vines along with the monkeys being a prime example of the crap bits).

ILM and John Williams are working at the top of their game, as is editor Michael Kahn. Shia LeBeouf shows again that he is a genuine movie star. Cate Blanchett (another bona fide movie star) has a ball with her Boris and Natasha Russian accent before being given a send off which resembes nothing so much as the dark flip side of the fate which awaited Richard Dreyfuss at the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sure, the formidable talents of John Hurt and Ray Winstone are pissed against the wall here, but I refuse to say anything bad about a movie in which Cate Blanchett and Shia LeBeouf engage in a sword fight from the back of two moving vehicles. Now that's movie magic!

The Blu-ray disc, by the way, looks and sounds fantastic.

A good look...

The beard works, Matt.

Great Matte Paintings #3 - The Birds

The Birds (1963)

I could fill dozens of these posts with matte paintings from The Birds. Albert Whitlock's extraordinary work is peppered throughout the film, helping to create the township of Bodega Bay, replacing sunny blue California skies with dark thunderheads and most famously in the stunning closing shot, representing an unprecendented (in 1963) complexity of compositing. The shot here is my favourite, however - a trademark Hitchcock oblique extreme high angle, reducing human civilisation to geometric blocks on the screen and people to mere dots. A piece of live action footage nestles right in the centre of frame - a lick of flame across a carpark. As if that wasn't enough, the shot is soon filled with dozens of swooping gulls, each one painstakingly rotoscoped by hand.

Here's the painting, showing the black area where the live action footage will be inserted.

Cute...

I'm gonna try and not get too gay porn or NSFW here, but you gotta admit, this is pretty cute...

Score of the week

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (John Williams, 2005)

This, the climax of George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy, was one lame film. A classic case of join-the-dots storytelling. Even as fx house ILM reached greater heights with the types of environments and characters they could create, the script plumbed the lower depths of laziness. And just as Ewan McGregor catches the spirit of the young Kenobi and makes him the man we met in the original films, the other cast are resigning themselves to the fact that they are just parts of a machine. We get the Palpatine that Ian McDiarmid usually saves for Christmas parties, Samuel L. Jackson is clearly not engaged by the material as he was in the second film, and poor Natalie Portman can do nothing but watch her character turn into a series of plot devices, before being forced to act the most poorly conceived cinema death ever. George Lucas must have simply lost the will to write. Or bloody well direct, for that matter.

If only the hints dropped in the original trilogy (like Alec Guiness as Ben Kenobi wistfully recalling Luke's father) weren't so evocative, and hadn't had decades to grow in our imaginations. Many fans of the series could have (and probably did) pen superior third instalments. Lucas' insistence on filling in every possible gap (from the evolution of each type of spacecraft to not being able to resist explaining the Emperor's decrepit look in the original films, as if twenty years of abusing the dark side of the force wasn't enough) made it feel like watching a screenwriter run through a checklist of things he had to do. There was more excitement in the Pavlovian response the trailers generated - the right combination of R2 beep, Wookiee growl, laser zap, and bursts of John Williams and the LSO tweaking geek pressure points in anyone of a certain age. It's sad, because Attack of the Clones seemed to be a step in the right direction. Even The Phantom Menace has aged better than I suspect Sith will.

At least John Williams wasn't phoning it in. His score is full of beauty, action, adventure, and despair, even if it doesn't reach the heights of adrenaline as such cues as 'The Asteroid Field' from The Empire Strikes Back. The John Williams of the last, let's say, sixteen years is a different composer to the man who scored Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Dracula. He's a less excitable composer now - his instincts tend more towards subtlety. But he has not lost the capacity to produce thrilling music. Go on, give it a spin and tell me that 'Anakin vs Obi-Wan' is not a terrific action cue, or that the last two minutes of 'Anakin's Dark Deeds' is not beautiful and heartbreaking. Williams has become less prolific of late but when he does choose to work (because it must surely be always there for the asking for the most legendary living film composer) he always delivers something special.

Hollywood set to blandify another hottie...

Crunching his abs and dropping the pounds to play the Green Hornet.

Et tu, Seth Rogen? Well, it was nice while it lasted...

Star Quality

Great Matte Paintings #2 - Dune

Dune (1984)

This one is a pretty extraordinary piece of work. The painting - by Syd Dutton working under the supervision of legendary matte artist Albert Whitlock - was on two separate pieces of glass (one for the foreground cables) and had spaces left in for exposure of live action footage of extras walking around on wet concrete. Further exposures of live action overlays for bursts of steam and flame...

 

...plus a miniature cable car shot against bluescreen...

 

...plus a motion control camera move tilting up to follow the cable car...

...make for one of the great matte paintings of the 80s.

Great Matte Paintings #1 - The Blob

 

The Blob (1988)

This Chuck Russell directed and Frank Darabont scripted remake of the 50's sci-fi favourite was not a box office success and is now largely forgotten. Which is a shame, as it's a clever and exciting B movie which captured the appeal of the genre in a similar fashion to the more fondly remembered Tremors.

The matte painting here is from the opening of the film.

The painting - by matte artist Robert Scifo - was photographed using split screens, dividing the painting into eleven horizontal strips, each shot with a slightly slower camera move than the strip beneath to impart a sense of three dimensional perspective to the painting. A roll axis was added to the camera as well, making the shot look remarkably like a real helicopter shot. It's an interesting comparison to a similar opening shot from The Witches of Eastwick a year earlier. That one was an actual helicopter shot, but shot with a high tech gimbal so steady that it made the shot look like a matte painting!

Foreground clouds were photographed as a live action element and composited into the shot by Dream Quest Images, who had been doing striking work in the couple of years leading up to The Blob in films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and were not far off winning Oscars for work in films like The Abyss. Throughout the 80s, there were two big effects companies in the Hollywood effects industry - Industrial Light and Magic and Boss Film. Dream Quest was the first new fx kid on the block to really give these two companies serious competition in terms of innovation and quality of work. Of course, seven years later the industry became dominated by digital technology and the number of fx houses producing world class work ballooned. Still, in the age of Digital Domain and fx houses in Europe and Australia becoming well known, Dream Quest held their own, being bought by Disney and producing terrific work for Mission to Mars. And then being unceremoniously shut down by a studio that decided it didn't really need a costly in-house fx facility after all. But I digress... here's a screencap from the tail end of the shot, after the composited clouds have cleared the frame...

 

Australian Blu-ray viewers well served again...

The Blu-ray disc of RoboCop contains the director's cut of this wonderful film. I've seen reviews of this and other Blu-ray discs contain phrases like 'screwed the pooch' and 'dropped the ball' over failure to port over special features from previous DVD editions, but as far as I'm concerned, if you get a great film (like this) in High Definition and the transfers are good, I'm a happy customer.

Region B Blu-ray of 'The Shining' is longer American cut...

I haven't come across much in the way of commentary or reviews of the region B Blu-ray disc of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, although there is definitely something about this disc worth highlighting, especially for region B (Australia, UK) readers.

Stanley Kubrick trimmed one scene from The Shining after the premiere screening - a brief epilogue featuring Wendy and Danny safe (not sure of it's exact nature - it may have been a scene of them fishing, as in the book). When the film was met with befuddled reviews and unspectacular box office, Kubrick and Warner Bros made further trims for the international market, removing some 15 or so minutes of footage (around 30, according to the DVD and Blu-ray packaging but I don't often trust them and can't be arsed putting the discs in to get the exact number). Presumably one of their main goals with the new cut was to shorten the film by 1 reel for international distribution.

It is this shorter version which has been the only version available on home video formats in Australia, including the DVD. Until this new Blu-ray disc, which contains the original domestic (US) theatrical version.

It is not a radical transformation of the film - it remains magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying - but some sequences are imbued by certain moods as a result of information we know about the characters in inserted scenes. But you know this already, don't you? If you've already found this blog, that means you're the kind of person who already has the Blu-ray disc.

If so, I suggest you check out the short documentary on Wendy Carlos and her music for The Shining. A ten minute look into the world of this extraordinary lady.