Film

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Tintintastic

Film Film Reviews

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

I don’t need to re-cap the level of anticipation to which I ascended in the lead-up to Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic strip series The Adventures of Tintin; my salivating is all preserved on-line. Getting worked up ahead of the fact is part of the fun with modern blockbusters, but it means that actually seeing the film can often be a let-down. Amongst the recent mega-franchises we probably have to go back to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to find one that truly lived up the hype; at the other end of the spectrum, and far more common of late, are wretched let downs like Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Tintin arrives heralded to the screen by both Jackson (as producer) and Spielberg (as director), so the form line for this was mixed. The good news is that their adaptation does justice to the source material and lives up to the expectations. I loved The Adventures of Tintin.

One of the key things that fuelled expectations was the talented triumvirate of geek favourites that Spielberg and Jackson had snared for screenwriting duties: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish. The trio have done well in forging a largely seamless hybrid of Hergé’s The Crab with the Golden Claws and The Secret of the Unicorn, with a few small details from other books thrown in for good measure. The start of the film recalls the tone of Hergé’s earlier Tintin stories, with Tintin entering into an adventure accompanied only by his brave and faithful dog Snowy; in the latter portions, Tintin meets and then teams up with the irascible drunkard Captain Haddock. Their quest is to locate a series of parchments which, together, will provide a clue to the location of a hidden treasure; racing them to the target is the murderous Sakharine. The adventure takes Tintin from Europe to north Africa and back again.

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The Timing of Tintin

Film

I was lucky enough to see Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin tonight, at its first Melbourne screening. However, they did ask for reviews to be held until 1 December. I’m so ridiculously, insanely grateful to have gotten into that screening that I will of course honour that request. I’ll be overseas then, but will endeavour to have my review ready and log in to press “post” on, or close to, the fateful day. So for anyone interested in my thoughts, check back around then. (Edit, 17/11: I have now twigged that WordPress lets me schedule the post. So it should appear first thing in the morning on 1 December.)

I can understand their reasoning on this to a point: they don’t want the buzz peaking too early (but why, then, hold our release so far back after everyone else’s?) It will be interesting to see how well the dam holds, though, especially since the movie is already out in Europe, and they were actively encouraging tweeting about the film (and tweets from tonight’s screening are already flying about).

Call it a hunch though: I don’t think Paramount will be blacklisting me for saying it’s fabulous.

Until then, here’s the trailer.

A Kommendable Kael Kakophany

Film

I should apologise for the paucity of posts, and film-related posts in particular, of late. The irony is that a big part of the reason is film-related thesis work (it will be a shame when I lose that all-purpose, reasonable-sounding excuse for not writing more often.)

I did want to briefly break my silence, however, to highlight the slew of good writing that has been appearing online about Pauline Kael. The publication this week of a new anthology of Kael’s work (The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael) as well as a new biography (Brian Kellow’s A Life in the Dark) has lead to a flood of re-evaluatiuons of the critic. The first I saw was this one by Nathan Heller at the New Yorker, but then followed Camille Paglia and Jim Emerson and Frank Rich and Dan Callahan and Armond White and “The Siren” and Andrew O’Hehir and Matt Soller Zeits.

It’s an embarassment of riches, and the there is, predictably, a lot of overlap in these pieces. Nevertheless, I urge you to have a look at them if you are at all interested in film criticism. I wrote my own piece on Kael a few years ago – here – and not having read the two new books don’t have much to add to what I wrote back then. And most of what I would add has been said better somewhere else by one or other of these writers. (It is hard, however, to imagine that the new anthology is better than the incredible For Keeps, published back in 1996).

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A Mixed Bag: Two Exhibitions at ACMI

Film

Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen (ACMI, 22 September 2011 – 29 January 2012)

Margaret and David: 25 Years Talking Movies (ACMI, 17 August – 4 December 2011)

I am really reluctant to criticise anything about new shows at ACMI. Having written quite a nasty review of their Setting the Scene exhibition and then nit-picked at the much better Dreams Come True, I don’t want to seem like I have it in for them. I can also appreciate that we in Melbourne are fortunate to have the place at all: film fans in other Australian cities would love to have such a resource. So I don’t want to seem ungrateful for their new exhibition Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen. Once again, though, if I am honest I have to say I came away a little under-whelmed. I’ll keep this brief because as I said I don’t want to harp.

As with Dreams Come True, this is not nearly as problematic as Setting the Scene, avoiding many of that exhibition’s truly debilitating issues: things like layout and presentation of items are generally fine this time around. The big issue that remains, though, is one I have a nagging feeling might be inherent to the kind of moving-image gallery ACMI is trying to be: the oddity of presenting films in a gallery setting. A large part of the best content in this exhibition is film and video footage: there’s Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) and other early silent films about space exploration; a great Fleischer Koko the Clown cartoon; some interesting contrasts of real launch footage with Hollywood recreations such as Apollo 13; a blistering attack by Tom Lehrer (embedded below) on rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; and so on. It’s good stuff, but it’s inherently problematic to present this kind of thing on wall-mounted screens in a gallery setting. There’s probably several hours of footage in the exhibition, which means it takes considerable stamina to sample a significant portion of it. Aside from a few genuine “installations,” most of it would be best enjoyed sitting down, in a theatre or at home on a couch, edited together into a documentary film or television show. So I worry that ACMI may never get around the fundamental problem that films are not best appreciated while walking around an exhibition space.


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Just How Much Can a City Change?

Film Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

I wrote a couple of months back about the power of movies to preserve a record of cities as they used to be. In that post I included various pieces of footage of Melbourne, and one interesting thing was how recognisable the streets remained. There was no mistaking many locations – such as Princes Bridge, Elizabeth Street, and St Kilda Road – in footage as much as a century old. Despite everything that has gone on in the last century, Melbourne in the 1910s remains fundamentally recognisable. But how much can a city change?

That question was prompted by a video guaranteed to push both my film and planning nerd buttons: 1940s footage of Los Angeles recorded to be back-projection footage for a driving scene in an (unknown) movie project. This came to my attention via The Atlantic and UrbanPhoto blog’s twitter feed, and was originally posted in truly astounding quality by The Internet Archive (here). Below is a YouTube embed, but you can get even better quality on their page.

This footage is of Downtown L.A. and the nearby Bunker Hill district, and it gives some sense of just how profoundly Los Angeles has been transformed. In my previous post I alluded to the remarkable books by John Bengtson that reconstruct silent-film-era Los Angeles from the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd; one thing you get from his work is an idea of just how different a kind of city Los Angeles was in the first part of the twentieth century. This footage reinforces that.

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How to Not Read Everything I Write

Film Miscellany Urban Planning

I occasionally feel self-conscious about the weird mix of content on this site, with film reviews sitting alongside detailed discussions of urban planning issues. While I think some of my planning stuff (like my essays about the town of Seaside, or the urban design and planning of Disneyland) might be of interest to a broader readership, some of my posts are pretty technical and I appreciate must be annoying to the readers that followed me over here from my old film-related site, Cinephobia.

For this reason, I’ve now made it slightly easier to skip to just the content you’re after by creating subdomains you can bookmark for each of the two main threads of content. The two new addresses, which should be self-explanatory, are:

www.sterow.com/film

www.sterow.com/urbanplanning

You can also get an RSS feed that just delivers the film or planning articles. Here’s the film feed, and here’s the planning feed.

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An Urban Planner’s Guide to the Melbourne International Film Festival

Film Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

I had planned to do a fairly detailed post about the upcoming Melbourne International Film Festival, but I have been distracted by the release of the truly stupefying Small Lot Housing Code.  However, it would be wrong of me, given the dual focus of this page, not to at least note the amount of urban planning content on at MIFF this year.

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And to Think That I Saw it on Colonial Street

Film Television Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

Colonial Street B

A while back I posted about Courthouse Square, the classic town square used in countless film and television productions. As I argued then, I think these backlot places are interesting because they at once reflect and shape our ideas about community. When Hollywood production designers build a backlot set, they will aim for something that is at once familiar yet generic (since it will be used in many productions), while simultaneously desirable (since Hollywood films tend to show a world that is a little bit more exciting and interesting than our own). That’s the part where they reflect our desires.

Yet once built, those sets reappear in many productions. Over time, with repetition, those generic backlot communities can come to actually shape our image of community. I don’t want to over-sell this idea: obviously we don’t simply passively absorb a picture of the world from movies and then start to believe this is the way the world is, or should be. But I do believe that pop-culture iconography is party of the language we draw on to make sense of the world, and that Hollywood’s images of the quaint small towns, leafy suburbs, or the polluted big city become powerful visual signifiers that influence the way we picture different types of community.

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Old School Spielberg

Film Film Reviews

Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

With Super 8, J.J. Abrams pays tribute to a body of work that some feel Hollywood has been methodically aping for thirty years: Steven Spielberg’s work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet even if you accept the Peter Biskind “Hollywood drank Spielberg’s Kool Aid and was forever changed” school of thought – about which I said a bit more here – you’d have to acknowledge that it was a particular aspect of Spielberg’s filmmaking that Hollywood latched on to. The lesson everybody seemed to learn from Jaws, Close Encounters, and E.T. (plus George Lucas’ Star Wars) was that people were after escapist, wonder-inducing science fiction and fantasy. What almost all of the imitators didn’t understand, or couldn’t replicate, was Spielberg’s knack for depicting the real world setting and the domestic backdrop against which the adventure took place. That, of course, was what made the transition to the extraordinary and other-worldly in Spielberg’s work so effective. What makes Super 8 really interesting, albeit not completely successful, is the care Abrams devotes to replicating that more mundane side of the Spielberg formula.

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