May 29: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 2 (2012 -- Various)

★★★

This set of Pixar offerings looks like a creative studio becoming more cautious and a little stale.  Among the most cautious and stale are Mater’s tall tale of being a pilot, Air Mater, and his adventure in Time Travel Mater.  From the Cars franchise, neither of these two shorts is interesting or original but instead rely on what are now stock characters doing little unexpected.  Likewise, Hawaiian Vacation and Small Fry have the familiar Toy Story characters acting the same way they do in the three feature-length films and in the other shorts.  There’s not much new or clever here either but rather a remix of elements that fans of the movies already know.

Presto is pretty much a Warner take-off, though it’s so fast and visually witty that it scores a few laughs as a rabbit tries to get a carrot from his magician master.  The funniest film in this collection is the Wall-E spin, Burn-E.  Like Presto, Burn-E isn’t surprisingly original, but it mines the same silent comedy practices as Wall-E, and the laughs can bring tears.

Most of the other offerings here come from previous Pixar work, too.  There’s an overlong animated “documentary,” Your Friend the Rat, that is hosted by Remy and Emile from Ratatouille, but it lacks the snap and clever engagement of the feature.  The two Up spin-offs also lack sparkle .  Dug’s Special Mission has the good natured Golden Retriever creating Roadrunner-like situations for his aggressive pack-mates, and George & A.J. has retirees resorting to fantastic attempts to avoid the nursing home.  This film has a clever premise, but the animators don’t get much beyond silly in their conception. Overall, this entire group of nine short films in the collection imply a stagnation in Pixar's work on animated shorts, a reliance on tried-and-true characters and situations with little of the excitement of innovation that Pixar has brought to the genre in the past.

In fact, only three of the shorts in this collection represent original efforts in new directions, and only two of those have much engaging originality.  In Partly Cloudy, a dark cloud creates the bad babies of the world that a bedraggled stork has to deliver, while bright clouds create the good babies for the happy storks.  This film doesn’t develop anything unexpected.  On the other hand, Day and Night has two transparent characters whose outlines reveal scenes during, respectively, day and night.  Not only is this concept highly original, but the film even develops a story involving the two.  This is a fascinating short film that is simultaneously self-reflexive and traditionally narrative.  It’s one of the most imaginative shorts in either of the two Pixar collections.

La Luna is similarly engaging, though for different reasons.  This coming of age short has a boy caught between his father and his grandfather as he tries to create his own identity.  The film has wonderful imagination, like the way the boat anchors itself to the moon and the task the men have of cleaning the stars from the moon's surface, and it has a simple story that feels like a fairy tale.  An Italian feeling in the work ranges from the characters' hand gestures and speech rhythms to the costumes and the music.  La Luna won the Academy Award for animated short this year, and it deserved it.

May 21: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 (2004 -- Various)

★★★★

This is a fun collection of films from early Pixar.  In the very first short, 1984’s Adventures of Andre and Wally B, there’s a silent film vibe that will become more obvious in later films like Wall-E.  Even more, shorts like For the Birds and Tin Toy rely on the expressive faces of silent film, especially the eyes, that is a Pixar animation trademark.

And many of these films anticipate Pixar projects, too.  Tin Toy and Knick Knack anticipate the Toy Story trilogy, not only with their interest in toys but even with some of the toy characterizations.  The terrible kid of Tin Toy might be a predecessor of the daycare kids of Toy Story 3, and the sleek figures of Knick Knack anticipate Barbie and Ken in tone.  There’s also an interest in an old man character in Geri’s Game that anticipates Up, a film that deals sympathetically with an old curmudgeon but skirts maudlin cliché for the most part. 

This collection also shows the beginning of Pixar producing short film tie-ins to some of its major releases.  is a hilarious slapstick riff on the Mike and Sulley characters from Monster’s, Inc, and Jack-Jack Attack uses classic Warner reality bending to posit what would happen to a babysitter as an Incredibles superbaby begins to use his powers.  Mater and the Ghostlight shows the danger of such an approach becoming stale, though, as this little short overdwells on Cars’ Mater character without using much inventiveness.  It’s to Pixar’s credit that the studio typically avoids such predictable, uninvolving projects.

Mike’s New Car

And this collection also finds Pixar reaching outside Pixar World and stretching its creativity in some unexpected directions.  In some cases, like that of Red’s Dream, this outreach fails.  This little short has a distinctly graphic novel tone that ultimately only feels derivative.  One Man Band is hardly more engaging with its link to European culture, and Boundin’ feels like vintage Disney in the Wild West.  Slightly more fun is the slapstick-in-space Lifted with a young alien fumbling a human abduction under the critical eye of a supervisor.

The best film of the collection, and the one of most importance to Pixar, is the very short Luxo Jr.  This 1986 film not only gives Pixar its desk lamp icon, but it gets at the element in Pixar films that makes them unique and that brings people back to theaters again and again: Pixar films’ focus on an emotional core that evokes a shared human experience.  Here, a child (lamp) breaks his toy and is consoled by the parent before the kid finds a new toy he likes just as enthusiastically.  The bemused parent looks directly at us as we share this human moment we all recognize.   In its two-minute run time, Luxo Jr reveals the crucial element in Pixar’s ongoing success in feature length computer animation.

May 20: and (2008 -- Richard Linklater)

May 19: Macbeth (1948 -- Orson Welles)

★★★
Despite the point that Epstein and Lennon tried to make in The Battle over Citizen Kane, Orson Welles wasn't banned from movies after the Hearst conflict.  Instead, he was part of several bumbled projects and had so much trouble finding directing work afterwards that, in 1948, he ended up working on a project for B-film studio, Republic Pictures.  That’s where he made Macbeth.

This Welles film is an interesting adaptation of the play.  His technique here has some strong echoes of his work in Kane.  There’s the deep focus that Kane is so famous for, and characters’ faces shift in and out of light to reflect their conflicted, changing morality.  And again here, movement attracts attention wherever it is in the frame, even if that’s in the background.  For example, when Macbeth leaves Duncan’s chamber after the murder, it’s a tiny movement in the background, but with the stasis in the rest of the frame, our eye is drawn that way.

Some elements of Welles’ Macbeth also recall Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Pt. 1.  Macbeth unfolds Ivan is infused with a similar setting and mood.  The clunky royal wardrobe and décor in both is similar, especially the tall, slender staffs that characters carry.  There are even overwrought clergymen in both.  And both films hearken back to a theatrical, silent-film ethos of dark expressionism.  The overwrought, twisted atmosphere of paranoia in Ivan, Pt 1 is not far from that in Welles’ Macbeth.

mostly on a soundstage whose lighting and effects create a claustrophobic sense of psychosis and doom, and

But despite Welles’ using such cinematic elements to create an appropriate atmosphere for Macbeth, the movie remains only partly successful.  The staging is full of tension and psychosis, yet the atmosphere leaves us uninvolved because it’s hard to become invested in Macbeth or his Lady.  Many productions highlight the drama and conflict of the couple’s descent, but in this one, it’s hard to care much about the characters or about the state they rule.  Macbeth is an interesting film to watch, but it is far less compelling than many adaptations of the play are.

May 18: RKO 281 (1999 -- Benjamin Ross)

★★

This made-for-TV movie is just awful.  Liev Schreiber can't carry a film at this point in his career, and the script doesn't try to make it easy for him.  There’s no sense of Orson Welles that comes through here.  Welles does one thing and then another, has one opinion and then another, lacks passion, and verbalizes thoughts like “we all love in our own way,” which the film then blithely ignores ignores in terms of character action though repeats verbally.  RKO 281 is a waste of some very good talent.

As part of a series around Welles and Citizen Kane, though, RKO 281 offers a few small rewards.  For one, it's fun to spot Ross' restaging of some of the newsreel footage that's used in The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  And though the picture quality isn't great in the edition of RKO 281 that I saw, the lighting and sets were rich.  Good visuals redeem the movie a little.

But it's disappointing Ross isn't able to pull off a more cohesive portrait of Orson Welles here.  Instead, RKO 281 leaves that task to another project.

May 17: The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996 -- Michael Epstein & Thomas Lennon)

★★★★
After watching CItizen Kane with Roger Ebert's commentary, Lou and I decided to do a Kane series and cued up The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  It was a good choice to follow the Ebert commentary because, while Ebert focuses on technical aspects of the film, Epstein and Lennon fill in more of the historical context.  

Done mostly in a Ken Burns style, Battle uses photos and film clips, though it splices in a few talking heads, too.  It will satisfy people looking for a way to situate the many popular stories and claims around Citizen Kane.   For example, we've heard Welles was wildly popular as a high-profile, creative genius, but Battle fills out that cliche with details about Welles' WPA theatrical work, his racing around Manhattan in an ambulance, the publicity surrounding him after his War of the Worlds escapade, and his appearance on the cover of Time.  Details like that give some grounding to the claim we're familiar with, and they give some context for the power that RKO ceded to him in his movie contract.

Ditto for William Randolph Hearst.  It's known that he was a powerful media magnate, but the scale of his wealth and power become clearer in this documentary.  He not only covered the nation with his media empire, but his ego was so big that he presumed to create news -- like having a Hearst employee fake an accident to test government services -- and even manipulated issues of war and peace, as he did in Cuba, in order to sell his papers.  So entitled did he feel that he ran for president, became a target of Franklin Roosevelt and created an estate in California that was half the size of Rhode Island.  And filled it with whatever art and architectural elements he could buy.  His power and influence extended to Hollywood, where he bullied all the major studio heads into an effort to suppress  Citizen Kane.  The photos and documentary footage of Hearst in Battle show the extent of Hearst's power.

It there's a fault with Battle over Citizen Kane, it's that Epstein and Lennon don't demonstrate their central dramatic thesis: That Hearst and Welle's destroyed each other in this titanic clash.  Hearst was already failing by the time  Citizen Kane was released; the fact that it was released at all shows that.  Hearst had far more problems with cash flow and debt than he did with Welles.  As for Welles, despite the fact that Hearst had slung every type of moral and political smear he could, including the ever-useful "communist" epithet, Battle never shows that this campaign had a lasting impact on Welles' career.  The fact that Welles' popularity declined after he went to Hollywood doesn't mean that Hearst was responsible for the decline.  In fact, Battle doesn't explain what it means when it says Welles' career was destroyed.

But although The Battle Over Citizen Kane fails to portray an epic struggle between two titans that results in their mutual demise, the film still provides excellent social context for Welles' movie.  That's a valuable enough service. 

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May 16: Citizen Kane (1941 -- Orson Welles)

★★★★★

Sight & Sound can arrive at whatever conclusion it wants, Citizen Kane is a masterpiece of the highest creative order.  Lou and I wanted to rewatch the film, and the recent passing of Roger Ebert gave us a good opportunity.  We decided to watch Kane with the Ebert commentary.  We had a little toast to Ebert and settled in for an evening with him and Orson Welles.  It's a very fine way to spend some time with an intelligent, articulate critic and an important American film.  Ebert covers nearly every point I've heard about Kane's technique and then some;  it's like taking a film studies class about the movie.  A few of Ebert's observations:

• the constant position of the lit window in the opening sequence of cuts
• repeated patterns of motion or actions that link scenes in the film
• the low, muslin ceilings that allow even, diffused light
• holes in the floor to allow low-angle shots
• the difficulty of lighting the depth of the frame to let us see action far in the background
• use of lighting on faces to connote mood or morality
• Welles’ triangular compositions
• the regular placement of “witnesses” at the bottom right of the screen
• Welles’ use of visual perspective to increase or diminish a character’s importance, even as the character moves in the scene
• efforts of cinematographer Gregg Toland to create focus from the deep background to the foreground
• people’s dislike of that focus, which didn't tell the audience what to look at
• the use of motion in the frame to focus attention
• use of technology like mattes and the optical printer to reduce the cost of the film
• the low budget of the film
• editing to create crowd scenes
• watching scenes like the warehouse toward the end to see the accumulation of artifacts as a restatement of the film's story

Ebert also drops a few pithy insights.  He compares Kane to Star Wars in its heavy use of special effects.  He also compares Kane to Birth of a Nation by saying that Wells sums up sound film to that moment and points the way to medium's future in the same way that Griffith does with silent film.  It's in that last comment that the importance of Citizen Kane resides.

Ebert talks mostly nonstop for the entire two hours of the movie and engages throughout.  He doesn't have time to talk about the historical or biographical aspects of Kane, and he doesn't talk much about the characters or their psychology as presented in the film.  But the commentary fleshes out the technical achievement of Welles and his team, and the experience of watching the movie is richer for that.  And I'll add to the chorus: We'll miss Roger Ebert.

May 14: Restrepo (2010 -- Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger)

★★★★★

After watching Which Way is the Front from Here?, I decided to revist Restrepo to see if I liked as much as I thought I did and to see if some of the ideas in the recent documentary were, in fact, relevant to this film.  I did, and they were.

Restrepo is going to transcend many of the Iraq/Afganistan documentaries because it’s less about the specifics of the war than it is about the men pulling the trigger on the front lines.  This film isn't a critique of the rationale or conduct of the wars, and it isn't about the wars’ futility or the corruption of our nation’s profiteers.  Instead, Hetherington’s sympathy and his affection for his subjects – dwelt on in Which Way is the Front from Here? – create a compelling portrait of a group of young soldiers living together under unrelenting, life-threatening stress as the camera takes us through their moments of intense fighting and times of mundane work and play.  And this interspersed with moments of candid reflection, both in a studio setting as well as at OP Restrepo.

The candid moments are touching, as when the guys play guitars, work out, wrestle or recall growing up in a
protected environment.  They express honestly, in front of the camera, their anxieties about a patrol or activity before the camera heads out with them onto a hillside or village.  Their enemies are remote; the Americans don’t see their opponents’ eyes when they shoot at them, and incoming fire comes from far away. They respond to it with long-range weapons.   Death is only beside you in the OP, and the only blood you actually see is that of your fellow soldiers.  It’s a grim, hard, tense world.

With Hetherington and Junger embedded in 503^rd, Restrepo only shows us what the company sees.  Like the soldiers, viewers see nothing of the lives of the Afghans, and we watch powerlessly as military leaders talk to the Afghans like they are less than human.  One officer tells the local leadership to forget all the abuse that occurred under the leadership of the former officer, as though a slate of evident maltreatment could be wiped clean with a few glib phrases.  We see the fear on the face of another local who is suspected of Taliban alliance and, another time, we hear an officer apologize to a man after American forces have killed several members of his family, women and children.  His apology -- that we killed a lot of bad guys and that he’s sorry the man’s family was also killed -- underscores the dehumanizing gulf that exists between the local population and the men of the 503^rd, and  the situation bodes badly for America’s winning the hearts and minds of the locals.  But honestly, what else could the young officer say or do? 

Restrepo is mostly a vivid portrait of the comradeship that emerges between men at war, and the strength of the film is the tender, detailed soldier’s life that emerges.  But it’s also about war itself, the way postcard scenery is a field of battle and the way absurdities make bitter sense.  And it's for this amalgam that the film will last.