Movie Review: The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is either written and directed by Terrence Malick or a skilled parodist. It features everything we've come to associate with the reclusive filmmaker -- hushed, elliptical voiceovers; magic hour lighting; nature footage imbued with mysticism -- turned up to 11. Last week the film won the coveted Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. So it must be amazing, right?
Yes and no. One of the sequences that seems to be dividing critics goes from the birth of stars to the creation of single-celled organisms up through dinosaurs set to transcendent opera music. The best effects are reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey (that film's effect supervisor, Douglas Trumbull is credited as an Effects Supervisor for Tree of Life) and the worst are plainly digital, lacking the texture and play of light that Malick and his d.p., Emmanuel Lubezki, have otherwise crafted. But I don't fall on the thumbs-down side regarding this sequence because of imperfect CGI. I fail it for how uncreatively it remakes the "Rite of Spring" sequence from Walt Disney's Fantasia, released in 1940, three years before Malick was even born. It is depressing to think that cinema has traveled only inches since that time. This sequence is reportedly an outgrowth of an aborted project from the 1970's called Q as well as related to an IMAX special on the origin of life, so perhaps it's no accident that it feels shoehorned into the rest of the film.
But what about the rest of the film, which is not about the origin of life, but about a family who shares an era and hometown with Malick himself? Malick is famously reclusive, so I'm not going to assume the film is autobiographical. What I can say is that the little moments that the film flits between seem too specific to be entirely invented. Hunter McCracken plays Young Jack, the oldest of three brothers, and his relationship with his mother (Jessica Chastain), father (Brad Pitt) and middle brother (Laramie Eppler?) form the core of the film. The way the film is edited suggests that much of it takes place in the head of the adult Jack (Sean Penn), who is perhaps an architect, and who is reflecting back on his childhood, perhaps after a failed marriage.
One of his brothers died at the age of 19. We never find out which one, or how. I guess the film is not about that. This being a Malick film, summarizing is dangerous and difficult. Here's where I stand on his previous "masterpieces": I only enjoyed and felt I got something out of The Thin Red Line upon second viewing. Badlands and The New World (Original Theatrical Cut) I liked right away. I have not seen Days of Heaven.
I wish I had waited for video to see The Tree of Life (notwithstanding the excellent photography and sound design) because I'd want to be able to pause and rewind and try to understand the image system Malick and his team have created. The tree in the yard seems to be freighted with symbolism, as do shots of the sun, birds, and diaphanous white linens. But, as with the opaque imagery of modernist poets like Wallace Stevens, even with time and diligence I might never figure out what exactly they are meant to communicate.
Movie Review: Thor
The shape of Kevin Feige's Marvel universe is now becoming clear. It's an audacious and ambitious attempt to bring a mythology from print to screen. It's a pity that Harry Potter has already done it with nine interlocking films, or it might be more noteworthy. What is novel is that, if a character as silly as Thor can succeed with mass audiences, there is probably no limit to the amount of movies that can be used to print money under the Marvel banner. Disney's $4B purchase of Marvel is looking very astute.
Not following? Let's visit Wikipedia for a moment:
March 2007, David Maisel was named Chairman [of Marvel Studios] and Kevin Feige was named President of Production as Iron Man began filming....
In 2009, Marvel attempted to hire a team of writers to help come up with creative ways to launch its lesser-known properties, such as Black Panther, Cable, Iron Fist, Nighthawk, and Vision.
On December 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company purchased Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion.
But What about the Movie?
What Thor demonstrates is that the Marvel mythos is so grand, it contains all of Norse myth within it as a mere sub-mythology. It's also, on balance, despite some satisfying moments of royal succession drama, a silly silly film. The breezy tone of Iron Man is not successfully replicated by director Kenneth Branagh and writers J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich (story) and Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Don Payne (screenplay, ampersand indicates a writing team). I am not familiar with the comic book Thor, only his inspiration from Norse mythology. And while I have the word of two fans of the Thor comics that the movie satisfied them, I can't guarantee that it will satisfy the average non-comics reader who loved Iron Man. It certainly seemed an inferior film to me.
Which isn't to say it isn't fun. Certainly as fun as the remake of Clash of the Titans, which also featured gods and heroes doing battle with tusked monsters. (Why does every monster in movies these days have that tusk design, anyway? Did Cloverfield start the trend?)
If you judge Thor not on its own merits, but as a warm-up to an Avengers movie -- just as Captain America will be, I presume -- then it succeeds admirably. In case you missed it, the film contains a reference to "one of Stark's" creations -- as in Tony Stark, Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. And Jeremy Renner makes an appearance as a dude with a crossbow -- Hawkeye, another member of The Avengers. I did not see Iron Man 2, but I understand it also laid some groundwork for The Avengers film scheduled to be written and directed by geek king Joss Whedon. All I have to say is, this better be the Citizen Kane of comic book films. There's only so much groundwork laying I'll tolerate without a payoff. The Jungian archetypes that are these superheroes better join together to become a map of the human mind or something. (more...)
Book Review: Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV
Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV
by Lori Jane Coleman A.C.E and Diana Friedberg A.C.E.
I've been working in post-production for about five years now, much of that time as an assistant editor and all of it for the same company. So, while I have a perspective on the profession, it's just a single view-point. Thus it is with some eagerness that I picked up Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV with the hopes of getting a broader view.
Book Review: The Master Switch
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
I did not think I would be reviewing this book for this site. After all, this website is about filmmaking, not information empires. But it turns out, one of the central information empires examined in Tim Wu's gripping history of modern communications is the empire of American moviedom. And Wu argues that the developments in the field of motion pictures have a lot to say about the rise of telephones, radio, television and the internet, and vice versa. In fact, the history of filmmaking in the United States shows both how an industry can fall prey to vicious censorship and how, through the rise of independent voices, that censorship can be broken.
How Restrictive Copyright Created Modern Hollywood
Wu is not the first person to tell the story of how the Edison Trust (that's 'Edison' as in 'Thomas A.') drove filmmakers from the East Coast with heavy-handed enforcement of patents. Edison himself was not the first-mover in motion pictures, but thanks to a strong position from controlling the phonograph (audio recording) industry, he and his confederates in the Motion Picture Patents Company were able pool sixteen key patents, forcing would-be filmmakers to pay license fees, and block foreign film imports, which were quite competitive in an era where films were silent.
This is an example of what Wu dubs "the Kronos effect," after the mythological titan who consumed his own children. You can see the Kronos effect at work all over the place today: it's what happens when Google or Facebook uses their financial advantage to gobble up a promising start-up rather than worry about being gobbled themselves down the road. Edison and the Film Trust did this with film technology patents, and for a time they forced distributors to buy their films by the foot, with no regard for quality.
A couple upstart producers wanted to break away, and California offered a sunny climate far from the political and legal influence of the Trust. That's right, Hollywood itself was founded on intellectual property violations. (TCM has an upcoming documentary series called Moguls and Movie Stars about just this chapter of film history.)
How Vertical Integration Led to Censorship
Wu speculates that the independent producers of Hollywood ended up beating the Trust simply because their business model generated much better films. Regardless of why they won, the industry quickly morphed from little independent producers into big Hollywood studios, and the few remaining companies began to consolidate all aspects of the movie business. The main skirmishes were over who would control distribution and exhibition. Hollywood studios would force a theater owner to screen several inferior films in order to rent a print of a big star vehicle from the same studio. Theater owners cried foul at this practice of "block booking" and Hollywood responded by buying their own theaters. Anti-trust actions by the US government would later set limits on this so-called "vertical integration," but not before The Code came into being.
Wu emphasizes the Production Code (often called the "Hays Code", after William Hays, President of the MPPDA, a fore-runner of the MPAA) could not have been so effective at censoring Hollywood films had the industry not been so consolidated. If the Legion of Decency, a private group affiliated with the Catholic Church, had had to achieve compliance from hundreds of producers and distributors, the task would likely have proved too difficult. Instead, one man, Joseph Breen, could set up an office and have the scripts for every movie in America funneled through it. Never before or since has one man's sense of morality so influenced mass media.
The Rise of the Indies
In 1948, the United States Supreme Court sided with an anti-trust action by the Justice Department, declaring Hollywood "an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade" and forbade the Studios from owning theaters, the so-called "Paramount Decree". This split caused economic turmoil in the industry and old and new models of filmmaking battled through the 1960's, with idiosyncratic films made with a personal touch competing against cookie-cutter commercial films (something analyzed in the book Pictures at a Revolution using the five nominees for Best Picture in 1968, a watershed year after which the independent voices became predominant).
Wu points out that the pornographic film Deep Throat in 1972 played in the same theaters and made the same kind of money as a studio blockbuster. It was a far cry from the days of the Hays Code. You can argue that the ratings that we have today can be used by MPAA censors to marginalize films. An NC-17 is often considered a commercial kiss of death. However, the fact remains that by forcing exhibition out of the control of the major studios, the Justice Department made room for bold fiilmmakers to deliver films like The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown and so on, which never would have been permitted under the heavy-handed Production Code, nor greenlit by studios who didn't have to compete for audiences by offering new cinematic stories.
The lesson to today's filmmakers is the same. Wherever the studios aren't serving audiences, an opportunity exists to both make money and great art. What I learned from reading The Master Switch is that all information empires are doomed to fall eventually (although AT&T seems to have reanimated like a splintered broom in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"). By understanding the mechanisms of the market, an upstart inventor (or filmmaker) can avoid the Kronos Effect and one day wrest control over the megaphone that is the Master Switch.
* * *
The Master Switch comes out November 5, 2010. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon.
Guest Movie Review: Ghetto Physics
Today the movie to review is Will Arntz' and E. Raymond Brown’s Ghetto Physics: Will the Real Pimps and Ho’s Please Stand Up!
Ghetto Physics is about the affiliation between the pimp and the ho and how that relationship can be extrapolated into politics, the economy, and even one’s everyday encounters. While the overall message of the film is positive -- in order to make the world a better place one must change oneself from within first -- the presentation is stretched too thin. The film is comprised of faux interviews of Brown intertwined with a classroom scenario in which the viewer gets lectured at. The interviewees and students in the classroom are used to asked loaded questions so that Brown can expound upon what he wants. To say the least, strictly from a filmmaking approach, it is a fickle way to get a message across.
What was special about Will Arntz’s last film, What the Bleep Do We Know?, was that it presented new and interesting ideas on the universe and the world we live in with great visual metaphors. Ghetto Physics just seems to be one man’s lecture on how you should live your life. Considering I was a fan of What the Bleep, Ghetto Physics was a let-down: a fine idea, however a not-so-good follow-through. On a positive note, there are a slew of notable thinkers, movers, and shakers from Princeton’s Dr. Cornell West all the way to rap icons Too Short and KRS-ONE. Unfortunately, while hearing what they have to say about the pimp game is interesting, I will not stand up.
--Jeff P
* * *
Ghetto Physics is having select screenings around the US right now. You can check out the trailer and other promotional materials on the website for the film.
Jeff P is a movie-lover and a writer for the website TastesFunny.net.
Movie Reviews: Wall Street II and Catfish
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Gordon Gekko is back and so is Oliver Stone. After losing the baseball in the lights with W., this sequel to the 1987 film Wall Street has upped his stock in my book. Maybe he will always be more at home as a director when thinly fictionalizing reality, rather than doing a kabuki version of it.
Either way, once again we are treated to a masterful drama of family and human relationships set against the current Wall Street climate. Last time it was Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, eager to make a buck, corrupted by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). This time, Shia LeBoeuf is in the hot seat. Only Gekko seems to have been changed by his eight year stint in prison. Now he's a Nassim Taleb-like prophet of doom, with a book preaching the truth about market shenanigans.
Gekko wants back into his daughter Winnie's life. Winnie is played by the winning Carrie Mulligan and she is betrothed to Shia's Jake Moore. Jake wants to help her find some closure, and maybe trade that for some tips that will help him get revenge on Churchill Schwartz, the thinly-disguised version of investment bank Goldman Sachs, which, in this film, has a hand in sinking the thinly-disguised version of Lehman Brothers Bear Stearns.
What's nice is that the Wall Street stuff is all accurate, as near as I can tell, but it takes a back seat to the relationships between people. Stone, as screenwriter/director, seems to be advancing the philosophy that much of Wall Street trading is based on the human currencies of rumor, greed and revenge. And his thesis about how to get through this crisis is optimistically human... make babies.
The filmmaking is masterful, even if it does indulge in Stone's trademark over-the-top flourishes. There are useless graphics, snap zooms and spinning helicopter shots. (The d.p., Rodrigo Prieto, who also worked with Stone on Alexander seems to be having fun mirroring Wall Street's sudden rises and falls.) There are also lovely bits of detail. I love the ballad of earrings in the gala scene, as telling of Wall Street excess as any Ducati chase scene.
Other than some bit players, the acting is superb. Josh Brolin's mannered Bretton James character is phenomenal, and Susan Sarandon makes an impression in just two brief scenes. I'm surprised I haven't heard any Oscar buzz yet about this film. There is much worthy of awards recognition, and what's more, the movie contains a vision of Wall Street which is worthy of recognition by Main Street.
More: Economist Tyler Cowen's view
I knew next to nothing going into Catfish and that is how I recommend seeing the movie, because following the story zigzags the young filmmakers behind it have put together is fun, surprising, suspenseful, intriguing and, ultimately, touching.
I saw it at a screening where the editor, Zachary Stuart-Pontier, spoke about shaping the surprising tale from hundreds of hours of footage and then refining it with executive producer Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans). Once you see the film, you'll understand how great a job the team did in telling this story with humor, computer graphics, and even some poetic cinematic moments. Stuart-Pontier says the rumors are untrue. There was nothing faked. There was discussion between the filmmakers, for example, that in some scenarios X Y'ing Z might be a good scene. But the things that happen in the scene where X Y'es Z are all genuine.
I will say only this about the plot: Because it involves facebook, it will make a great companion to The Social Network. One more facebook movie and we'll have a hat trick!
IF YOU REALLY WANT SPOILERS: Thinksplosion Review
Book Review: The Business of Media Distribution
The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV and Video Content in an Online World
by Jeffrey C. Ulin
It seems cheeky at the moment to announce on the cover of a book how to "monetize in the online world" "from concept to $1 billon" -- no one has been able to make money on the web at the same scale that conventional distribution offers, near as I can tell. But I do appreciate that Jeffrey C. Ulin, a former distribution manager at LucasFilm, Paramount and Universal, is offering a theoretical framework.
Right up top he presents Ulin's Rule:
Content value is optimized by exploiting the factors of time, repeat consumption (platforms), exclusivity and differential pricing in a pattern taking into account external market conditions and interplay of the factors among each other.
If your eyes just glazed over reading that, you are not alone. Although the bulk of the book is not as dense and jargon-heavy, I would have found a breezier tone helpful in slogging through some of the unsexy topics it covers.
And like a strong distributor, the book covers a large territory. Taking the "from concept" literally, there is a chapter on development (and a short discussion of how PIXAR manages to have a greater success rate with the stories it develops than any other producer in history). Also of wider scope are a chapter on financing, one on Hollywood's creative accounting, and a chapter on marketing. But the heart of the book remains media distribution, and the remaining chapters break it down traditionally according to outlet: theatrical, home video, television and ancillary (merchandising, video games, airlines, etc.).
This book itself is remarkably difficult to put into a distribution category. There is a great deal of material in here that independent filmmakers need not concern themselves with, except out of curiosity about how things are done by conventional studios, who can avail themselves of much greater resources. Those working in distribution in the big media companies, on the other hand, will probably already be familiar with much of this, and might desire both more technical information and more outside-the-box speculation about radical ways to restructure operations. Film students would do well to tackle overviews of the industry that do a bit more hand-holding such as The Filmmakers Handbook or are designed as textbooks, such as Entertainment Industry Economics, although there is an encyclopedic quality to this book that makes it read better as a reference than a cover-to-cover experience. I definitely think that industry observers, such as business reporters and market analysts, would find the whole of this book beneficial.
Reading the book did spark some thinking about the nature of this strange industry. On p. 49, Ulin points out that, unlike with other industries, the consumer can't truly know if they will like the product until after it has been consumed: "If you accept this proposition, then development and distribution may be less bookends than the blind leading the blind." While the film industry is highly chaotic, accepting that proposition may be going a step too far. I think there are some factors that will indicate if a script will make a good film, or if a given viewer will enjoy a movie.
Ulin seems to equivocate on the subject. Quoting Art DeVany's Hollywood Economics, he notes that herding and information cascade effects make 'word of mouth' unpredictable. On the other hand, Ulin's Rule would seem to imply that a distributor can figure out the best way to position a film, presumably because there are indicators which give clues about how best to do so. That he believes the subject merits a book is a hint that perhaps he does not truly assert that the driver at the wheel the school bus is blind -- maybe just in need of some sun glasses?
Often to the chagrin of film producers, the art of a distribution executive is not to give each film the best shot it can have at 'catching fire' but to allocate limited resources for a slate of films to maximize returns for the whole shebang. Ulin covers many tools which distribution professionals have at their disposal, among them licensing models, trailers, press and PR, joint ventures and profiling release patterns.
Ulin emphasizes the 'known knowns' of distribution, how it has conventionally been done up until this age of the internet. The history lessons are well-chosen, but there are few examples from other industries which might shed light on how the unstable current system might shake out. And Ulin's Rule and other rules of thumb presented in the book would be much more useful if put into mathematical terms, even if only in an appendix in the back. It's one thing to say that a distributor must balance exclusivity with differential pricing, but a formula that attempted to quantify the balance would provide a great deal more information.
The few times I get a sense of point of view from Ulin, I strongly disagreed with his take. For example, in discussing piracy, he uncritically quotes figures from the MPAA about lost revenues. There is no discussion of whether the premise that every person who pirates a movie would have paid full price in the first place is a valid one, nor of the effects of persecuting potential customers, nor if it is even possible to reduce piracy beyond a certain level, much less completely eliminate it. (I did agree with Ulin's suggested anti-piracy strategy, which is to undercut or co-opt the pirates, making legal partners of them when it is in the capitalistic interest of both parties.)
Brief flashes of personality aside, The Business of Media Distribution is flat and journalistic. It is well-researched and clearly comes from someone with a deep practical knowledge of the world of distribution. Because it lacks a strong point of view on the subject, however, I can't recommend it for casual readers. Those with a deep interest in the subject probably have their own point of view, so I recommend they bring it along.
Movie Review: Inception in IMAX
The patient shall be rewarded. A stellar final act will shine upon the faithful.
I don't want to spoil a moment of Inception by describing any details. I plan to watch it again and come back here with a spoiler-filled analysis.
Until then, I'll just paint with some broad generalities.
Inception combines many of the best elements from the mind-bender Christopher Nolan movies Memento and The Prestige with the action-movie Nolan of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Fans of these films will find themselves on familiar ground.
Movieplex Mike might find the film muddled at first. The opening act cuts together scenes in a way that made me wonder if a reel was missing, or a screw was loose in the head of writer/director Christopher Nolan. While defenders are sure to pipe up that this is Nolan refusing to spoon-feed us exposition, it's my suspicion that the opening is actually just not handled very well. I'll reserve final judgment until my second viewing and report back.
(It may be that part of the problem is that many lines in the first act are spoken by Marion Cotillard and Ken Watanabe. I'm convinced that they are fine actors; I'm just not convinced they don't need subtitles when speaking English.)
The good news is that the movie soon settles into an elegantly escalating heist plot that involves the invasion of the dreams of a corporate scion (Cillian Murphy). Professional dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) must assemble a team that would make Jung proud, gathering an Architect (Ellen Page), a Forger (Tom Hardy), a Chemist (Dileep Rao) and a, I don't know, Friend (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
There are some rules to how these dream invasions go, and much like the conjurer's rules of The Prestige, they involve enough involutions of deception to put Scheherazade to shame. Which is not to say that Nolan and editor Lee Smith haven't done a good job of keeping them distinct enough for someone who is paying attention to follow. I'm just not sure Multiplex Mike will be able to follow it.
Then again, the audiences whose minds were blown by The Matrix is a sizable group. If the movie gods smile, this smart blockbuster won't be a bust. And that's a dream I'd like to be in.
IMAX review: Worth it for the sound alone. The sound design in this movie is incredible, and I'm convinced that IMAX's high standards are one of the few places where you're guaranteed to get the full gut-shaking experience. As far as the visuals, I'm less convinced. You can definitely see the flaws in Ken Watanabe's make-up right off the bat. It's good - but not IMAX good. Likewise for a few of the CG effects (exploding wooden crates or floating blood drops, to name two that stood out for me). The screen does not "open up" for the full IMAX frame like it did in select scenes of The Dark Knight IMAX. I could tell that some shots were shot in the larger format, with top and bottom presumably cropped. But I didn't spend the whole film trying to pick out what was 35mm anamorphic and what 70mm native. Visually, you're probably getting a marginally better experience from a smaller frame, but it does not outweigh the sound advantages. Not just the effects but the Hans Zimmer score was tremendous.
MORE:
Review of The Prestige
Movie Reviews: Kick-Ass and How to Train Your Dragon (RealD 3D)
Is it worrisome that I was not as shocked by Kick-Ass as the movie was clearly intended to make me? Yes, there is some horrible violence perpetrated -- and a few choice epithets spoken -- by a young girl. But nothing that seemed out of place in the world in which the movie takes place, one on the pop-art side of the color palette from Se7en, a movie which also treats violence and vigilantism as symptoms of a dessicated society (albeit more seriously).
But what the opening of Kick-Ass promises ('not just another comic book story'), it ultimately doesn't deliver. Perhaps it's better entertainment to conform, in the end, to the storytelling tropes we expect. The problem is that for much of the film I was bored, watching it all play out in the way I expected, albeit with some directorial verve from of Matthew Vaughn of Layer Cake and Stardust.
Everything I enjoyed about Kick-Ass basically revolves around Nicolas Cage. His over-the-top persona in this film is just what the doctor ordered, undercutting the grandiose pretensions of the plot and adding a certain patina of weirdness in his relationship with his daughter, Mindy aka Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz, also fantastic). When the movie cuts back to its A plot, about the hapless Dave Lizewski, played credibly by British actor Aaron Johnson, all the momentum goes out. Rather than reveal he is a sexy superhero, Lizewski pretends to be gay so he can hang out with his crush. Thankfully, the movie doesn't belabor this exhausted situation comedy setup, although its climax, where Lizewski reveals his true identity, is the movie's least believable scene. What should be a shock to Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) is not taken seriously by the writing or the acting.
Johnson plays awkward, but is never that nerdy. Meanwhile, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, as rich geek Chris D'Amico, shows how nerdy is done. When his character, another teen with pretensions of superherodom, dons a mask, the result is fantastic. The movie not only generates humor from the disconnect between the person and the persona, it actually generates some real inner conflict as well. Mintz-Plasse has been typecast as an übergeek since he came out of a massive Superbad casting call to play one. But in terms of acting, it's one thing to indicate geekery, as Aaron Johnson does here or, say, Anthony Michael Hall does in Weird Science. It's another thing to have the geekery be the background for a richer emotional palette.
To say Kick-Ass doesn't deserve Mintz-Plasse, Cage or Moretz' performances is to short-shrift the writing. There are certainly interesting layers in the film. It just makes the more one-dimensional parts stand out stronger, perhaps.
Perhaps because of a smart/dumb duality, I do feel the movie was mis-marketed. The yellow block lettering against black with bloody splatter seemed calculated to evoke another box office underperformer, Watchmen. To pull in the mass multiplex crowd, both movies would've had to be PG-13'd down. But neither story benefits from that sort of thinking. The worst parts of Kick-Ass seemed to be a half-hearted pander to this mentality.
While the movie may have disappointed at the box office, I don't think my reaction to this film is typical. The audience at the Vista Theater opening night was definitely into it, and my comic-book-loving friend was bouncing with excitement the entire film. Maybe he had built up my expectations too high for the movie. Or maybe, post-Watchmen, a cinematic deconstruction of the superhero genre feels passé. Pick your reason, but I'm downgrading the title to Butt-Slap. It's a fine film, but it doesn't totally kick ass.
I know I'm a few weeks late to weigh in on the box-office battle that occurred between Dragon and Kick-Ass. Basically, the story is that Lions Gate, the distributor of Kick-Ass is facing a takeover from a guy named Carl Icahn, who is famous for buying companies and dismantling them. Icahn has been persistently trying to take over Lions Gate for a while now, although as movie libraries plummet in value, I'm not sure how he thinks he can break it up and sell off the pieces for more than the whole.
Regardless, Lions Gate has a barbarian at their gate, and they tried to pull a fast one by including some Thursday numbers in their weekend box office projections in order to edge out Dragon in the week it opened. (Both movies opened softer than expected.) In the ensuing weeks however, Dragon has continued to fly.
But all of that inside baseball has little to do with the merits of How to Train Your Dragon. Dragon is a fine date movie, and equal to Kick-Ass in the geek-becomes-hero department. I really liked the production and character design, especially the grizzled Viking who has an arm that can be interchanged with various Viking implements, including a beer stein.
If Kick-Ass has a predictable story arc, then Dragon has the same, but more. Nonetheless, it's entertaining all the way through, and fine family entertainment. I doubt it will go down in animation history as a classic, but the use of 3D is generally pretty good. The flying sequence has rightly been praised, and the few "gimmicky" moments are fine by my book. As always, I recommend seeing it in RealD if available, over other formats like Dolby Digital 3D or IMAX 3D.
Honestly, in the two weeks since I saw it, not much of How to Train Your Dragon has stuck with me. Dreamworks continues to churn out hit movies but still live in PIXAR's shadow. I guess if I had to put a finger on it, it is that the PIXAR movies come from a more sincere place than the Dreamworks ones. Shrek is still the tentpole, and it's built around satire. Dragon has more heart than other Dreamworks Animation films I've seen, and if that's the direction Katzenberg and co. is headed, then PIXAR should watch their backs.
Book Review: The Power Filmmaking Kit by Jason J. Tomaric
The Power Filmmaking Kit: Make Your Professional Movie on a Next-to-Nothing Budget
by Jason J. Tomaric
(Focal Press / Elsevier)
Cover Price: $39.99 / £22.99
The Power Filmmaking Kit joins a tradition of recent book + cd d.i.y. filmmaking packages like The DV Rebel's Guide and The Shut Up & Shoot Documentary Guide but it beats its predecessors in sheer heft. Weighing in at 400+ pages, the book aims to be the complete guide through all stages of making a low-budget film.
The author Jason Tomaric's claim to fame is directing Time and Again, a "profitable, award-winning, internationally-distributed independent film made for under $2,000." Unlike say, The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, the author's movie is included with the book, so you can judge for yourself whether it looks better than the reported budget.
Continue reading about The Power Filmmaking Kit by Jason J. Tomaric...
Only an hour hour long, Time and Again tells the story of Bobby Jones, a convict who, in the middle of escaping from prison, falls through a time portal to the 1950's, to a day that lead up to his being wrongly convicted for murder. The movie takes an interesting detour -- if you could sleep with your father's mistress, would you? -- but comes back to Bobby's attempt to prevent his younger self from being framed.
The movie itself is handsomely mounted for the quoted sum of $2,000. Clearly Mr. Tomaric and his collaborators were able to get essentially everything for free. The major coup was probably all of the classic cars and extras in 50's era costumes. But the movie is not without anachronisms, even to a casual viewer, and a distributor would not be fooled into believing the movie had a big budget. Time and Again was clearly shot on video with non-actors. The lighting and camera work and sound are competent but not anything to write home about. "Hollywood quality," as the book repeatedly claims? I think not.
In any case, I appreciate the honesty of having the actual movie that is referenced in the book available to see what the result is of certain budget corners being cut. I actually believe that, given 2 million dollars and big name actors, the presentation of the story would not have been substantially improved.
Jason Tomaric's commentary is very literal, mostly covering what edits were cheating two locations together, or what problems were overcome to achieve individual shots and scenes. I think emerging filmmakers will sympathize and find some of his examples of how he digitally created certain coverage after the fact useful. Those filmmakers should also note that re-shoots are expensive, so avoiding them through more thoughtful pre-production is always preferable.
The Book
The book begins with a chapter on writing. Tomaric's approach is fairly formulaic, encouraging the filmmaker to work in established genres and use established structures. Nothing wrong with that; in fact it is good advice to give someone who is looking to sell their movie at the end of the process. He also encourages optioning material and working with a writing partner. Both of these are potential traps for a low-budget filmmaker. While some options can be had for $1, you still need to pay lawyers to draw up the contracts. Also, collaborating with a writing partner can sink a project if the collaboration goes sour. After all, you both own a piece of the material. Better to hire a writer -- again, requiring a legal contract.
Unit 2 is pre-production. This includes standard headings like Budgeting and Locations. What I haven't seen in other books of this type and feel is very valuable is the chapter on Insurance. It breaks down the types of insurance available. In future editions I hope it is expanded to relate that there are currently very few companies who insure low-budget productions, and the cost of insuring them is quite high. There are ways to 'umbrella' under other companies, and certain non-profits exist for just this purpose.
The book does include ballpark figures in the Crew and Equipment chapters, which is great and will be really helpful to inexperienced producers.
Unit 3 covers production. The information on directing actors and acting techniques is great. Mr. Tomaric editorializes more when he covers different camerawork aesthetics like Dogme 95 and Cinema Verité. That chapter recovers quickly, thanks to some wonderful camera and lighting diagrams for scenes from Time and Again. Coverage is an interesting beast. You can always sense when it is bad. These diagrams go a long way towards showing how to break down complicated scenes with several lines of action.
The Audio Recording section is good and includes a great recipe for a cheap boom pole. The Makeup chapter also includes some cheap recipes for prosthetics in addition to some basic makeup information that I haven't seen elsewhere and found quite useful.
Unit 4 is Postproduction. It goes all the way through editing and music to distribution. While there is nothing revelatory about the way distribution is discussed, it's a good overview that sets the stage for more in depth books like The Insider's Guide to Independent Film Distribution by Stacey Parks.
The DVD
The DVD contains the movie, Time and Again, several "Modules" which are much like behind-the-scenes featurettes you might find as bonus features on a special edition DVD (interviews with cast and crew about the making of Time and Again) except they emphasize filmmaking advice.
Here are the modules included on the DVD:
- Intro to Writing
- Intro to Pre-Production
- Intro to Production
- Directing
- Intro to Editing
Additional modules are also available after free registration on the website, powerfilmmaking.com. There isn't anything in the modules that can't be gleaned from the book, but I appreciate the fact that some people learn better visually than textually. If the modules have a flaw, it is that they contain too much PR-type material of the cast and crew praising each other and not enough emphasis on nuts and bolts details of filmmaking.
The one time the modules do go into detail, in the "Intro to Editing" piece, the information they give is unhelpful and perhaps misleading. Mr. Tomaric shows his editing set-up -- essentially the same one I was using circa 1999 -- but says that Firewire hard drives are a "reliable" way to store the footage you are using to edit with. Putting aside the fact that a Firewire 400 drive is too slow for many indie workflows, any kind of hard drive can almost be guaranteed to fail. Only by having multiple drives in some sort of RAID array can access times and reliability be achieved. In any case, the cost of even Mr. Tomaric's outdated setup is surely more than the entire quoted budget of $2,000 for Time and Again.
The extra files on the disc are in two folders: Footage and Forms. The footage is a nothing inclusion, in my opinion, because it doesn't have a license that would let people remix and post to the web or use on an editor's reel. So you can practice editing a scene you didn't shoot if you like.
The forms are what will probably get the most use from anyone who buys the Power Filmmaking Kit. Here's what you get:
- Script Template (Microsoft Word)
- Script for Time and Again (.pdf)
What's fun about this is that it has notes and highlighting from the production. - Example Scene Breakdown (.pdf)
- Example Storyboards (.pdf)
- Blank Breakdown Sheet (.pdf)
- Example Camera Logs (.pdf)
- Blank Camera Log (.pdf)
- Example Equipment Inventory (.pdf)
- Example Movie Contracts (Microsoft Word)
An Actor Deal Memo, Location Agreement, Crew Deal Memo, Extra Release, Intern Deal Memo, Minor Release - none of which are represented to be legal - so you'll have to pay a contract lawyer to stand behind them - Example Call Sheets (.pdf)
- Blank Call Sheet (.pdf)
- Example Letters (.pdf)
This is what I believe to be the treasure trove of the whole kit. Reading through these letters, you can see how Jason Tomaric was able to secure locations and equipment for free: polite, professional letters. There are also some pages from the newspapers that were used as props, distorted by the .pdf conversion, and invitations to the premiere as well as a sheet of the custom tickets used.
Unfortunately, the .pdfs are an unhelpful choice in that they force you to remake the document yourself -- or you can print it without customizing it and hand-write on it (not really an option in this time of email attachments). One can find example forms (of varying quality) free on the internet already -- and you can edit them. It would've been better for the publisher to include everything in two forms, .pdf and .doc. This of course means people will file share... oooh.
The Website
As of writing, the companion website, powerfilmmaking.com, does not appear to be fully operational. The layout looks weird until you register for the site. After a free registration, you are invited to create a social networking page, where you can list your film credits and the equipment you have access to. At time of writing, the Photo Gallery option did not appear to be working.
As of writing, there were only 158 registered users, and the forums were bare. While it may in time come to rival established message boards like DVXUser, other than some additional modules not included on the DVD, it appears there is nothing on the website that can't be had elsewhere on the net.
Summation
While I can't recommend The Power Filmmaking Kit as the first and last book a filmmaker should buy, it certainly is a comprehensive overview of what it takes to make a small movie and it's a heckuva lot cheaper than a university credit hour. I look forward to a second edition that improves upon what is a very good structure for learning about low-budget filmmaking.
UPDATE 2011: Read a review of Jason Tomaric's new website, Filmskills.com.
Call Sheet
In the Can
- Once More For Safety: Why You Should Always Do Two Takes (At Least)
- Movie Review: The Avengers
- Movie Review: The Five-Year Engagement
- Your Wednesday Links: McNelly’s Crowdfunding Stats
- Your Weekend Viewing: Frame of Mind
- DVD Review: Like Crazy
- Your Wednesday Links: Canon 5D Mark III Gets a Workout
- A Guide to Lenses for DSLR Filmmaking
- Movie Reviews: The Hunger Games and 21 Jump Street
- Have Fun and Make a Movie: An Interview with Misti Boland
Word of Mouth
Favorites Re-Released
Back Catalogue
Balance Sheet
See other ways to support.
Help us go ad-free. Our pledge:
when donations beat ad money, we'll remove the ads.
