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CG Man Showdown: The Irishman v Gemini Man

I’m not interested in reviewing The Irishman or Gemini Man right now. What fascinates me is the Computer Graphics of it all. Two master filmmakers approaching a significant amount of this technology, deeply embedded in the storytelling of each film. But two very different approaches, which define how each film will be remembered.

Martin Scorsese – whose film I am anxious to see again before reviewing – basically made a film from a script as though he wasn’t making an effects film at all. This includes having the actors of a certain age give the physical performances that the age-reduced faces will be laid over. And the choice has fallen just right for a lot of film critics.

Ang Lee, on the other hand, does double, maybe triple, in comparison, duty on the cutting edge train. First, he continues to experiment with the 120-frame-per-second format. And it has a real effect on his work behind the camera. All the limitations of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk have clearly been measured, considered, and in many ways corrected this time out. The Big Two are the close-up and darkness.

120fps works much better – perhaps the only time in which it is superior to 24fps – in a tight shot of someone’s face. So we get a lot more of that in Gemini Man than we did in Billy Lynn’s. There is a lot of space in action… and that is fine… although it really looks like you shot it on your iPhone. But when you get emotional moments, fill that screen with face.

Darkness is also key… and a huge part of Gemini Man. It’s not all nighttime. And darkness doesn’t always eliminate the TV look. But when there is subtlety and variation in the light, the picture just looks much better in 120fps than when it is bright.

Darkness is also a key to the CG work in Gemini Man. The only time the CG character in the film screams that it is false is in the final scene – no spoilers here – in which the character is walking through a sunlit space in normal (not black, not camo) clothing. And it looks horrible. It’s almost as though Lee is trying to tell the audience, “Wasn’t that cool for most of the movie? Here is what we still can’t do well. So look forward to my next movie because we plan on fixing it by then.”

But overall, the creation of Young Will Smith on Gemini Man, is technically superior to the de-aging work on The Irishman. What is the measure? How distracting is the effect?

Simply, the “Junior” character is more realistic as a living being than the de-aged character faces in Irishman. And that is really because Lee & WETA built “Junior” to be the character in every frame. I am betting that there were also body doubles doing a lot of work for both “Junior” and Will. So there was likely some “adding the face” in stunts. (There was actually a shot in the motorcycle chase where I felt like I saw the stuntman’s face instead of Will Smith’s, which was kind of shocking given the amount of CG work here.). But mostly, they built “Junior” and his physicality and movement (lots of it close) and there were rare moments where the effect was obvious.

That said, there were many moments in Gemini Man that I know would have been better if Ang Lee were not leaning into the limitations of both the CG and the 120fps. I don’t think it’s arguable. Yes, I agree that limitations are of great value to forcing an artist to raise the bar even further than originally intended (see: Jaws), but some things were off. Particularly in sequences that should have connected emotionally – not the close-up talking, of which there is a lot – but within action sequences.

As for Scorsese and The Irishman, Marty clearly wasn’t going to adjust much for technology. In fact, he actually made a film that was slower and less visually flashy than he has in years. He kind of invites the scrutiny of the not-always-perfect CG work.

As I wrote earlier, he shot the movie… he cut the movie… they added the de-aging effects. When a 75-year-old body with a 50-year-old face throws a gun, you can read it as a misstep or subtext.

And the dichotomy of making his slowest-paced mainstream film while also engaging more computer graphics work – by far – than he ever as before is fascinating. And again, different people read that different ways.

As a result, many critics connect to The Irishman as one of Scorsese’s best. Not only that, as a career summation.

I don’t think anyone will see Gemini Man as one of Ang Lee’s best films. Unlike the effects-heavy Life of Pi, Lee seems to adjust to the effects rather than demanding that the effects – ironically, a lot easier to create a lion than a human – come to his directing choices.

Scorsese could have made The Irishman in the era before computer effects. In fact, DeNiro did a similar role in a film that I think Scorsese was paying great homage to, Once Upon A Time in America. They did use other actors to play the group in their early teens. But the group of actors was also aged up and down.

Gemini Man could also have been made, though there would have been a key concession, in that no matter how much the young Will Smith looked like Will Smith, he wouldn’t seem to be an exact match. Additionally, the stunt work would have been infinitely more complicated, unless somehow the best match was also a high-end stuntperson.

For me, the CG and 120fps efforts in both films come up short. We are still in the early days of this kind of digital actor replacement/enhancement technology. When used in abundance, it shows itself and distracts. Sorry. Wish it was not so. We can all see the remarkable progress that has been made. WETA and ILM continue to battle it out. And in some uses, the tech has seemed perfect. It helps when faces are obfuscated in some way.

But these two examples of this tech are not the same at all. The approach is very different. The purpose is different. And the results are very different. Both films will be seen as landmarks along the way to seamless work in the future.

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BYO Post-JOKER

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Review: Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood (spoilers)

I’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s 9th Film, Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood three times so far. I usually watch his films twice before writing, checking my most intense reactions against a second view. This time, I must admit that I have been trying to connect to a clearer reaction and I still am.

The easy stuff seems easy. DiCaprio and Pitt are both skilled actors and iconic movie stars and this is on display in all kinds of ways. Pitt, in some ways, recreates the spirit what is perhaps his most beloved character, Floyd of the Tarantino-written True Romance, about a decade older and living 25 years earlier in American history. He’s still a natural couch surfer and stoner. He is still indestructible through the power of his personality. But he also has been weaponized by a war and a miserable marriage. Unlike Rick, Cliff doesn’t seem to actually be a bigot. But he is wary. He embodies many of the ideals of white male strength with which a child of World War II would have been raised, the prime exception being success.

Rick is a mirror reflection of Cliff, as their roles as actor and stunt double would suggest. He has not been weaponized. He is soft. And he has magic… but he works incredibly hard to prove it, somehow so ashamed by the ease of it that he can’t relax into its pleasures. What Cliff can do with his bare hands and his well-trained dog, Rick needs a flame thrower to not quite match. He is the successful but aggrieved by the coming future that he has no control over.

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Speaking of The Dog… this too is a doppelgänger match between dog and master. Cliff has been tamed, to a degree. But like his dog, Brandy, he is able to deliver lethal, perfect violence on demand in an instant.

And this is why Once Upon A Time … is hard to dismiss as an empty vessel for Quentin’s kitsch obsessions. Just setting up the foundations of the two leads and the dog requires three full paragraphs.

The third major character in this film is Sharon Tate. Margot Robbie’s performance of pure, seemingly unconsidered sunlight is the best of the film. Yes, it is nearly a silent role. But it is critically so. Lovingly so. She isn’t playing dumb. But she isn’t showing herself to be particularly smart. She just is. There isn’t a moment without a light coming from her eyes and literally a rhythmic bounce in her step, whether music is playing or not.

The fourth major character is The Manson Family. All of it. But mostly, the women/girls. Charles is barely a part of the movie, except as a threatening idea. And with the women/girls of Manson comes the question of whether they are meant to be a flip side to the Sharon Tate character, as Rick is to Cliff. They share her youth and some of her exuberance. When we meet them, they are singing a camp song in unison. But while Tate is wanted and desired endlessly, these young women have had to find a place to feel at peace with themselves.

The great question around the film is how this all fits together.

The real-life murder of Tate and the rest (barely footnotes in the film) symbolize an end of the hope and love of the 60s era to many people. In the fictionalized narrative of this film, the focus of this element seems to be on the women, not the men. The young and aggrieved women are on their way to kill the hope and love that they were not so lucky to obtain as a matter of fate.

There really is no explanation in the film why the group, led by a weak, fearful boy in Fictionalized Tex Watson, veers off to Rick’s house instead of the house they were sent to by Manson. It could just be a mistake. He could be wanting revenge for the humiliation of being sent away by “Jake Cahill.” The plan could be to kill Cahill and then head up the hill to kill the residents of the Tate/Polanski residence. There is no yellow Cadillac to suggest that Tex or the women/girls recognize that Cliff, who “escaped” Tex’s threat of gun violence at The Spawn Ranch might be there. The audience just isn’t told why.

(I am writing off the illogic that Cliff somehow returns to the house without seeing the car full of Mansonians or the trio walking up the hill to Rick’s house. But I would not be shocked to find out that this and the lack of an explanation of the diversion by the Manson Trio were lost in an edit, things that could have slowed the pace and/or been too clear for QT’s tastes at that point.)

But there is no question that the violent, male machismo of the late Greatest Generation, stops the incursion of the grievance part of hippiedom on the hope and love part of hippiedom. And for no other reason but its own survival.

But what does that mean? Is it meaningful or is it just Tarantino fantasizing and amusing himself (and audiences)?

Of course, Rick gets to be the hero of the erasure of the Manson threat, just moments after Cliff is carted off in the ambulance, having basically taken on all three of the attackers. Rick thinks of himself as a key participant, as he fried a young lady who may well have already been mortally wounded by Cliff and Brandy.

There are dozens of other doppelganger moments in the film. There is the repetition of “I never had a chance,” which is spoken by Steve McQueen about having a relationship with Sharon Tate and by Rick about almost maybe getting the role in The Great Escape that transformed McQueen a couple years after Wanted: Dead or Alive, which seems to be the reference for Rick’s TV series in the film, Bounty Law, that Rick leaves for a failed film career.

We open with a look at Bounty Law, but the actual start of the movie is after the show is gone and Rick’s movie career has stalled out. So is Rick a winner or a loser? Are we meant to think that the offer by Pacino’s Marvin Schwarzs is a good sign or a bad sign, given that we in the audience know that the spaghetti westerns propelled Clint Eastwood to his run with Don Siegal that made him a full-on movie star? Even at the end of the movie, Rick has made 4 films in 6 months in Italy, but sees it as the end of his road.

Rick tells the young actress, Trudi, the story of his western novel, which is pretty precisely the story of Cliff, though he thinks it is his own story. This is made more evident late in the movie when Cliff takes a knife to the hip, which will surely not kill him, but will likely slow him down from the physical skills he shows (especially getting to the roof of Rick’s house).

Pitt is a too-good-looking-to-be-a-stuntman stuntman while Kurt Russell is too… but Kurt’s character still has the wife who keeps his manhood in a sack hanging from her belt.

Jay Underwood and Roman Polanski are Sharon Tate’s doppelganger short, handsome waif men.

James Stacy, who is a real actor (played here by Timothy Olyphant), whose real series, Lancer, was piloted around the time of the movie’s timeline and actually directed by Sam Wanamaker aspires to what Rick has achieved. And in historic fact, Lancer ran 51 episodes before Stacy became a perennial bit TV player. So he got what Rick had then unlike Rick, never took a next step of significance.

We don’t know at the end of Once Upon A Time …  whether Rick will find his Don Siegel or even if Roman Polanski will end up being that to him or if he will still end up selling his house, buying a condo, losing the Italian starlet, and disappearing into obscurity.

We can also wonder whether Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel would have had the successes they had together (Coogan’s Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry) had it not been for the Manson family sending the flower power era into a more conservative direction (as has been suggested by Joan Didion and others, leaving your sense of hyperbole to decide).

Like I wrote before… there is plenty of kitsch – and I have barely scratched that surface – but there is other stuff bubbling beneath it which isn’t clear, but is interesting.

And there is the very real possibility that Quentin is just doing what Quentin does… reconsider genres, whether one at a time or a few at a time. Go down the list… the heist movie, the Blaxploitation romance, the chop socky, the grindhouse, the Nazi war movie, the action slave movie, and the Agatha Christie. Of course, they are all twisted up with other genre conceits. The two that are the hardest to categorize (and are not in that list) are Pulp Fiction and Once Upon A Time …, which are both closer to being anthology movies. For me, when I think of directors that are emulated in OUATIH, I think Altman first. QT has none of the specific Altman quirks. But there is a rambling quality and an emphasis on performance that reminds me of Altman.

I haven’t addressed the physical abuse of women in this film and throughout his history. I can’t make an argument against the anger of some about this. Men take a lot of abuse in this film and all the others as well. But Tarantino was created by the heat of an era when women were objectified in much of film by an endless parade of white male directors. I don’t find it misogynistic. Zoe Bell is right. Sharon Tate is a goddess here. One could say that Squeaky Fromme comes off as strong and clear and smart and in control, however ugly her circumstances. So I am not outraged.

I haven’t spoken to the relative silence of the Sharon Tate character because I think the silence performance is brilliant and speaks quite directly to what he was trying to achieve, which was to deify her. She is the only pure thing in the film.

I haven’t mentioned one of the best sequences in the film, which is Rick’s day on Lancer, from his arrival to his encounter with Trudi (amazing child actor turn) to his self-abuse to a true movie star performance in a shitty little western TV show that rises beyond the way it does sometimes and you know a guest star on Law & Order is going to be a star for real. From that section, the audience knows what Rick really is and what he isn’t, no matter how he feels about himself.

And of course, that sequenced is intercut with Cliff at the Spawn Ranch, also showing us everything about who he is.

But discussing how much I like any sequence doesn’t seem to be the point here.

So how do I feel about the movie?

I don’t really have an answer. Still. It sure felt to me like I was building to a statement of believe in writing this piece. But no.

I don’t think it is a masterpiece.

I do think Quentin is a mad cinematic genius.

I don’t seek easy answers from movies, but I am also not expecting chaos from masterpieces unless that is clearly the means to an end.

I do think this is the most complex cinematic experience of the year-to-date from a major studio.

I will see it again. Maybe more than once (making 4).

I could write a whole 1500-word piece about all the things that push me out of the movie. But that doesn‘t seem helpful. Still, they exist.

This is a movie that people who love movies have to see. It will evolve in time. For a lot of people. For me. Maybe for you.

There is so much to chew on and so many blind alleys and misdirections. Perhaps that is just the nature of the beast.

Acid-dipped cigarette, anyone?

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How Scorsese Do You Expect JOKER To Be?

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BYOB – RIP The Goldfinch

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RIP MoviePass

Screen Shot 2019-09-13 at 3.21.13 PMGone on Saturday.

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BYO Autumnticipation

JaWohl Jojo

The cognoscenti traveling to Venice and Telluride have already tut-tutted the movies of fall and are spatting those overly familiar food fights about awards. Can they beat you away with their sticks?

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BYOAutumn Movies

red leaf

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“Raise A Glass To Peter” Fonda

Peter Fonda

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BYO Break In Summer Dog Day Dog Movies

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BYO Anima: Trailering HIDDEN LIFE

1. The trailer is cut to suggest that the historical moment is not then, but now.

2. Those pull-quotes are…

3. Jörg Widmer.

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The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon