Scanners

The framing of the Dark Knight

Jim Emerson

Cameron Smith writes:

I was working on a detailed response to the entire “What’s wrong with this picture” line of inquiry when I realized a very easy answer… it’s cropped! I reviewed my Blu-Ray version of the film and was amazed to see that it is very clear that the bus leaves the doorway of a bank, thus explaining the wood and dust. The bank robbery (like many scenes from the film) were shot in the IMAX format and aspect ratio (1.44:1). The 35mm print of the film (and DVD release) cropped those scenes to match the 35mm footage from the rest of the film (2.35:1 aspect ratio). The Blu-Ray release presents the IMAX footage in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio which reveals more of the original IMAX footage. While this may not invalidate your argument, I would argue that the cropped 35mm presentation of the film would lend itself to being more confusing. Having viewed the Blu-Ray version a couple times, I did noticed that the scenes filmed in 35mm (2.35:1) felt better composed than the IMAX shots, as Nolan had to frame them for multiple aspect ratios.

JE: I just checked the Blu-ray version and you’re absolutely right. There’s more wrong with that picture than I had suspected. I hadn’t seen the IMAX or Blu-ray versions — and my computer doesn’t have a Blu-ray drive, but I’d actually bought a Blu-ray disc and just took a look at it. Thank you (and I mean this sincerely) for actually looking at, and paying attention to, the MOVIE itself. This does temper my objections to the shot (since the framing isn’t as tight in all versions of the film), but I still think it was a poor idea to start in so close on the bus in the first place. Clearly this is another reason why. Too bad regular DVD viewers are going to be cheated further. To think, some people don’t think it matters where the edge of the frame is. It does!

UPDATE: Now, here’s another example of what I’m talking about, a video taken on location during the filming of the shot in question. Director Christopher Nolan made a directorial choice — not, I have argued, a particularly exciting choice, but he chose his shot for the movie. I assumed he started so tightly on the bus because he was trying to fudge an incomplete practical effect (the bus emerging from the bank). The guy who took this footage, from a window on the other side of the street down the block, shows what the scene looked like. If that doesn’t matter to you, if it’s just “nitpicky” in your view, then fine. Move along. You have an eye for the camera’s optimal movement and location or you don’t, and that’s true of viewers as well as directors. Perhaps something at the scene prevented the camera from moving further to the left? Every time I’ve seen it (and I’ve often fallen in love with movies I didn’t connect with the first time) I’ve felt “The Dark Knight” was riddled with off-putting, perplexing choices like this one. It just so happens that two forms of independent evidence (location video and cropping) have popped up to give us a better view of this particular example. But remember: I chose it as one specific example. I am not saying that this shot, and this shot alone, “ruined” the movie, fer cryin’ out loud. Together with a hundred more examples, however, I think it shows why the filmmaking is less compelling than it might have been.

MORE ANGLES from the location shoot here.

Boulderizing

Jim Emerson

I’m off to the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, (April 7 – 11) for my favorite week of the year. This week, Monday through Friday for two hours each day, I’ll be leading a discussion with the audience as we go through a great movie together, shot by shot. Last year it was “Chinatown.” This year you’ll be shocked to learn that I’ve picked “No Country for Old Men.” Complete schedule here. My schedule of panels, screenings, etc., here. I’ll be blogging when I can throughout the week. Other panels I’m on concern abortion in popular culture, the aesthetics of brutality, train-wreck celebrities, and digital acting. I can’t wait to see what we come up with!

Why Jonny Greenwood’s score wasn’t nominated

Jim Emerson

View image “There Will Be Blood” features a score that sounds like it could have been heard in the period, 1898 – 1927 (with the bulk of it taking place in 1911, the year Arnold Schoenberg published “Harmonielehre”). Some of it was composed in 2005-06 (Greenwood); some in 1878-79 (Brahms).

From Daily Variety (1/21/08):

Jonny Greenwood’s original score for “There Will Be Blood” has been ruled ineligible by the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. […]

The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy’s Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under “Eligibility”), which excludes “scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music.”

[Radiohead lead guitarist] Greenwood’s score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work (including selections from the works of Arvo Pärt, as well as pieces in the public domain, such as Johannes Brahms’ “[Violin] Concerto in D Major”). Peripheral augmentation to the score included sporadic but minimal useage (15 minutes) of the artist’s 2006 composition “Popcorn Superhet Receiver.”

Given that “Popcorn,” commissioned by the BBC in 2005 and previously performed in concert, broadcast, published, and made available on the Internet, is less than 20 minutes long, almost all of it (15 minutes) was evidently used in “There Will Be Blood.” I wonder if this contributed to my impression (not as strong the second time I saw the movie), that pre-existing swatches of music had simply been laid on top of cut footage, regardless of what was onscreen. (The intrusive, dissonant score — period-appropriate in its retro-modernism — bleeds over adjoining and unrelated scenes without changing from one to the next.)

What’s peculiar is that the Oscar nominations are due to be announced Tuesday the 22nd, and the Academy didn’t announce it’s disqualification ruling until Monday the 21st. So not only was it too late for the filmmakers to appeal, but members of the music branch who voted for Greenwood’s score were unable to vote for something else instead.

The ruling is perfectly valid and consistent. The timing is inexcusable. AMPAS continues to screw up royally, even according to its own rules.

Bowie & Marianne Faithfull: “I’ve Got You Babe”

Jim Emerson

I don’t know how I missed mentioning David Bowie’s 60th birthday in January, but I did. On a plane to LA recently I experienced my best-ever experience listening to “Hunky Dory” (1971). You know how that happens sometimes: You reconnect with something you haven’t listened to in a while (no matter how familiar you are with it) and you rediscover it as if you were really hearing it for the first time? (“Changes” spoke directly to me like nothing else on the radio when it came out, and I was a confused pubescent 13.) Anyway, that’s what a good close listen (iPod, passive noise-cancelling earphones, eyes closed, window seat on a plane) can do for you.

And, when I got home, I found this on YouTube, from a 1973 “Midnight Special.” A belated happy 60th to The Artist Formerly Known as Ziggy — and an early 61st birthday greeting to Lucy Jordan!

Werner Herzog analyzes Juno

Jim Emerson

View image Displaced Cannibalistic Desires.

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: If Werner Herzog were a guest entertainment pundit on the VH1 TV series “Best Week Ever,” discussing the success of “Juno,” by Michel Duchampbuffet:

The Phenomenon of Pregnancy creates in the Physiognomy of the Host the Epitome of humanity’s Displaced Cannibalistic Desires: one believes oneself to be engaging in the act of Creation, only to discover, behind the Blinding Cloak of Elation, the Insidious Mask of Suicide. One need not be reminded of the Mating Habits of the Appalachian Dung Beetle to realize that Pregnancy is merely an act of Self-Immolation, veiled by the Momentary Pleasure of Copulation so as to dispel the one Elemental Truth of Human Existence: that we are provoked not by the desire for Preservation but rather by the need for Destruction….

Gasp! Choke! As film criticism lay dying…

Jim Emerson

Clint Eastwood, a Caucasian American, made a movie about Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima in WW II. How “liberal” of him!

2006 was a big year for stories about the “death of movie criticism” — which were really just bandwagon-jumping trend pieces about the increasing numbers of studio products that the studios themselves don’t deem worthy of the expense of advance critics’ screenings. How can this be tied to some mythical decline in the influence of film critics? Have critics ever had the power to sell a stinker to the public? Or to warn a substantial portion of moviegoers away from a bad movie with a monster ad budget, marquee names and/or genre appeal (horror, comedy, action)? Would “You, Me and Dupree” (which was pre-screened for critics) have done substantially better at the box office if it had gotten good reviews? Of course not. Word-of-mouth travels fast.

So, if American film criticism is wounded or dying, it’s not because of any publicity department’s policies. It’s because of the crap some of the critics — even some of the most reputable — are writing.

If you want to watch film criticism writhe in agony from a mortal wound, if you want to see critical standards expire pitilessly before your very eyes, you need only read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s four-star (“Masterpiece”) review of Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” last week:

One reason I wasn’t sure what to think of “Letters” the first time I saw it was that I didn’t know how it would be received in Japan. I wondered if it would seem accurate to most viewers there. I’ve since learned that the response has been very favorable and that it’s been near the top of the box-office charts since it opened.

A Japanese film critic and friend, Shigehiko Hasumi, who was around eight years old when the Americans landed on Iwo Jima, admitted to me that even though he likes “Letters from Iwo Jima,” he prefers “Flags of Our Fathers.” I suspect he prefers it for the same reason I prefer “Letters from Iwo Jima” — because it tells a less familiar story. (I’ll concede that “Flags of Our Fathers” is stylistically more ambitious — in its exploration of how images are made and turned into emblems — but that doesn’t necessarily make it more successful.) I told Hasumi I worried that “Letters from Iwo Jima” might define the humanity of the Japanese characters only in terms of American traits (a bias I see in spades in “Lost in Translation”), but he assured me the film is true to a “certain Japanese reality.” He added that he found the portraits of the pro-American Japanese officers in the film a bit “romantic,” comparing them to John Ford’s depictions of Confederate officers in such films as “The Horse Soldiers.”

Critics be warned: Don’t form your opinions about a movie until you’ve checked the box-office charts and the critical and popular reaction from the region in which it is made or set! (I did a Google search for 腐ったトマト, but I couldn’t find a Japanese rottentomatoes.com — what am I to do?)

If Rosenbaum wanted to include the critical opinions of this “close friend” Shigehiko Hasumi, why didn’t he ask him what those opinions were? We learn that Hasumi preferred “Flags of Our Fathers,” but Rosenbaum can only “suspect” why. He says Hasumi “assured me that the film is true to a ‘certain Japanese reality'” — but what “certain Japanese reality” might that be? And is there only one?

I share Rosenbaum’s concern about films that “might define the humanity of the Japanese characters only in terms of American traits” (but I don’t see how it applies to the deliberately jet-lagged, discombobulated, “stranger in a strange land” sensibility of “Lost in Translation” — which, heaven forbid, was not popular in Japan!) But I don’t read Jonathan Rosenbaum to find out how a picture is being received in Japan, or anywhere else. I’d like to know how he sees the movie.

TIFF 2007: Casa of Horrors

Jim Emerson

View image Belén Rueda revisits “The Orphanage” of her youth. Or is it the orphanage that’s revisiting her?

As I was leaving the theater after watching Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage,” still in the movie’s thrall, I thought for a moment that maybe I’d seen my favorite of the festival. It was only the second film I’d seen (and the movies ahead included the Coens, Cronenberg, Rohmer, Herzog, De Palma, Rivette, Greenaway, and who knows how many other big names), but I figured this had to be a good omen. Because in that moment I believed it to be possible — and if movies mean anything, they renew and inspire hope for the medium itself.

Guierrmo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was my favorite film of last year’s fest — and, as it turned out, my best picture of 2006. “The Orphanage,” produced by Del Toro, isn’t the seamless masterpiece that movie was, but it’s another strong, dark fantasy-fable and horror movie about mothers and children — that is absolutely made for adults and not for children. I’d venture to say there are more goosepimply moments and well-earned jolts in this picture than in your average year’s worth of commercial shockers. And yet, it’s also the only horror film in recent memory that brought me to tears. (The last one may have been Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” — but that was nearer the beginning of the movie.)

View image Child’s play.

“The Orphanage,” as the title suggests, is an Old Dark House ghost picture (haunted by “The Haunting” and other shadowplays), with “Peter Pan” at the center and the specter of Roman Polanski repeatedly glimpsed around the edges, as if in tricks of peripheral vision. A ghastly face contorted into a permanent scream invokes “The Tenant” (and the open jaw will return in another horrifying image); a woman alone in rooms that play tricks on the mind, recalling “Repulsion”; a shot peering around a corner that, like the famous moment from “Rosemary’s Baby,” had me leaning to see what was in the blackness around the bend.

The revealing camera movement, in which you anticipate the sight of something (awful) beyond the edge of the frame, is the film’s signature. You know Bayona has gotten under your skin when Laura watches a 16mm silent home movie of what we’re told is a boy with a deformed face. We see the child from behind in an underlit room, studying at a desk. The hand-held camera slowly moves up behind him, but all we can see is the back of his head, so that we both dread the reveal and can’t wait for it. That’s the essence of suspense, and it’s a standard trick in the thriller repertoire. It just happens to be exceptionally well done here. And although I’ve touched on a half-dozen movie references already, it’s not because “The Orphanage” goes through the usual motions of offering shout-outs to its influences. They are well-absorbed here. (Oh, and did I mention “The Descent or “Dead Calm” yet? Think of the mothers driven to psychological extremes in those movies…)

Laura (Belén Rueda, from “The Sea Inside”) plays a fiercely devoted mother, raised in the institution of the title, who returns to the decrepit building with her husband and son. The boy begins to draw away from his parents in favor of new imaginary playmates he discovers in and around the house — and the beach cave beneath the lighthouse that can be seen from his bedroom window. Or, maybe, it’s they who discover him.

All due respect to “The Sixth Sense” (which I think is a nifty movie), but this isn’t exactly, “I See Dead Children.” “The Orphanage” takes its characters to the deepest, darkest places imaginable and dares them to fight their way back. There’s a distinctively Spanish/Mexican sensibility at work here, in which the gruesome realities of loss and death and decay are acknowledged in the open, a part of life as it is lived, and there are no guarantees of a fairy-tale Happy Ending for anyone. That’s because, as these cultures understand in their bones, the genuine, non-Disnified fairy tales don’t necessarily have happy endings.

Rueda’s performance is fearless and ferocious. Laura’s own orphan past returns as a deadly children’s game, a test to see how far she’s willing to go, how much she’ll risk, for her child. In some respects, her journey is not unlike the otherworldly plunge JoBeth Williams’ character takes in “Poltergeist,” to reclaim her daughter from the Other Side. There’s a scene with a psychic (a pale and spectral Geraldine Chaplin, looking like a Day of the Dead Catarina skeleton in Victorian dress) that also quite deliberately conjures up “Poltergeist.”

To describe this mother’s descent into the underworld as “bone-chilling” is not hyperbole. It’s just a starkly accurate description.

+ + +

An afterthought: Why are the sing-song rhymes and games of children so spooky? (One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door…)

Stories without endings

Jim Emerson

As I was leaving a matinee of “The Dark Knight” this week, I heard a little kid behind me say, “Well, we know there’s gonna be a third one.” This kid looked to me like he was 8 or 9 years old — maybe even younger. And he unmistakably felt the “Empire Strikes Back” cliffhanger vibe that concludes the second in this series of Batman movies. The Joker is left suspended in mid-air (though, sadly, he won’t be back), Commissioner Gordon gives a big speech over the closing montage about the importance of the heroes we need (and the ones we deserve), and Batman rides off into the dark night. The movie does have an ending but it’s still an open-ended ending.

Of course, a serial cliffhanger is one thing, but the strategy of some movies is to deny us the satisfaction of resolution…

Movies that allow you some breathing room

Jim Emerson

View image Ramin Bahrani on the set of “Chop Shop.”

Ramin Bahrani’s first two features, “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop,” live and breathe like few other films these days. (That’s why they’re two of my favorites of the current century.)

In an interview at IFC Blog, Bahrani gives a beautiful description of the kinds of movies he values — and, in the process, indicates what makes him such a fine filmmaker. Of course, I also happen to feel the same way about movies, so no wonder I like his so much:

Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film. That requires a viewer who wants to be engaged, who wants to have an emotional connection to a film, which should not be confused with films that elicit emotions like weeping and whatnot. You watch a certain movie, and the director puts you in a headlock through ways of dramaturgy, music, camera moves and excessive acting. It hits certain synapses in your brain and makes you cry, then you leave, and the next day you’re having a hamburger and you don’t really remember what the film was. Despite that those are the kinds of films that get lots of accolades and attention, it doesn’t attract me as a person nor as an artist. I’m more interested in the ones — because of your participation — [that] seep into you, and two months later, are still a part of you. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished this, but it’s what I’m striving for.What he describes — that space that allows the viewer to enter the film — is a quality I particularly treasured when going through “No Country for Old Men” with the audience at the Conference on World Affairs last week. Although the first time you see it you’re aware of pulse-pounding tension, suspense and unforseen eruptions of violence, the movie is really full of breathing room. Long wordless sequences encourage you to get inside the heads of the characters and see things through their eyes, to experience what they’re thinking and feeling moment by moment: the opening sequence (which I played once without sound so we could simply look at the progression of images, then see and how they play off of Ed Tom’s voiceover); Lleweylyn following the trail of blood to the two trees in the desert; Llewelyn methodically assembling the tools he will need to place the satchel in the vent; Chigurh tending to his wounds in the motel bathroom…

Moments Out of Time 2006

Jim Emerson

View image “Brick”: The third shot of the movie.

For 35 years, on and off, critics Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy have annually assembled a montage of memorable impressions from the year’s movies in a feature called “Moments Out of Time.” It began in the pages of the Seattle Film Society’s magazine, Movietone News, and continued in Film Comment under Jameson’s editorship. This year, it’s at MSN Movies. Whether the films themselves are big or small, good or bad, “Casino Royale” or “Climates,” nearly all of them have their indelible moments…

A few samples to whet your appetite:

In “Brick,” our hero’s dreamgirl (Emilie de Ravin) dead in a drainage ditch…

“Little Children”: In a dark playground, the accused child molester (Jackie Earle Haley) hunches over on a swing … all menace drained…

Lucy, the dog in “Old Joy,” always finding a stick to carry, and undeterred when it’s too big…

“Shortbus”: The lights go out in all the windows of a colorful, handcrafted model that stands in for New York’s skyscrapers, and a trick of shadow turns the buildings into crowded tombstones, a city of the dead…

At the end of a New York pocket park in “Man Push Cart,” Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) opens his cart for business just before dawn, as the lights in a line of little trees blink out one by one…

“The Queen”: The royal face arranged as public mask, softening imperceptibly when Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) asks a child if she can place a bouquet of flowers among the great drift of Diana’s tribute, and is told: “It’s for you.”…

Sick days

Jim Emerson

Wow, am I sick. Barely strong enough to stand up. I was standing in line at the pharmacy yesterday and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the floor, with my head spinning. All I can do is sleep through it…

Pearl of the South: A tale of two reviews

Jim Emerson

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s early cameo appearance in “Nashville,” at Lady Pearl’s Old Time Picking Parlor.

Please consider this my initial contribution to Andy Horbal’s Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon — happening all weekend at No More Marriages!

View image Inside Pearl’s Parlor: Red, white and bluegrass. Kenny Fraiser (David Hayward) enters from behind the flag at center.

How can two critics see (or remember) the same movie, and have such contradictory interpretations of how it works and what it means? And what better case-in-point than Robert Altman’s 1975 “Nashville” — now being remembered in the wake of Altman’s death last week, and seen through the prism of Emilio Estevez’s recent release about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, “Bobby”?

View image Lady Pearl: “The only time I ever went hog wild, ’round the bend, was for the Kennedy boys. But they were different.”

From two reviews of “Bobby”:

View image “… and the asshole got 556,577 votes.”

Watching the movie, I kept thinking of “Nashville.” And not just because Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece remains the most politically and psychologically astute big-ensemble/where-America’s-at movie ever made (it’s got a presidential campaign and ends with a beloved public figure gunned down, too). There’s a minor character in it, played by Barbara Baxley, who’s a Kennedy-loving Yankee married to a country music star. In one boozy monologue, she expresses all that was both hopeful and delusional about what the dead Kennedys represented for progressive citizens. I’ve never forgotten that speech, while the more simplistic and diffuse “Bobby” is already starting to fade from memory.

— Bob Strauss, LA Daily News

View image Alone at Mass.

Despite its reputation as an exuberant classic, “Nashville” knows zip and cares even less about country music or the city of Nashville (where it was shot) — which doesn’t prevent it from heaping scorn on both. It even ridicules a dowager who tearfully reminisces about John and Bobby Kennedy, and it shamelessly encourages viewers to share its contempt for the rubes. The relentless cynicism that Nashville brandishes as proof of its hipness ultimately gives way to glib, high-flown rhetoric in the climactic repeated shots of an American flag filling the screen while a nihilistic pseudocountry anthem, “It Don’t Worry Me,” builds to a crescendo, asserting the concert audience’s unembarrassed cluelessness.

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

First, I want to point out the obvious: Bob Strauss is right even when he’s wrong (I don’t think Baxley’s character is minor or a Yankee) and Jonathan Rosenbaum is wrong even when he’s right (Altman admitted he wasn’t interested in making a movie about the real Nashville or country music; after all, he let the actors write their own songs). Rosenbaum’s preoccupation with his own perception of “hipness” (which he deems extremely uncool) appears to have obscured his view (or his memory) of what’s happening on the screen in Altman’s movie. As I said in a comment over at The House Next Door, using “Bobby” to bash “Nashville” makes as much sense as using “Neil Simon’s California Suite” to bash “Short Cuts” — or “The Towering Inferno” to belittle “Playtime.” Yes, there are superficial similarities (as Bob points out), but in terms of ambition, complexity, vitality and sheer movieness, there’s no comparison.

Is suggesting “retroactive abortion” fora director’s mom a kind of film criticism?

Jim Emerson

I didn’t want to mention this whole thing, and Vadim Rizov has already done a fine job of going over the history of Armond White’s critical ad hominem attacks on Noah Baumbach movies here. Publicist Leslee Dart (who did not “ban” White from screenings of “Greenberg” — but she originally moved him to a later one) did mention that White had called Baumbach an “asshole.” (“You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an asshole. I would say it to his face,” he told Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism. “… I don’t need to meet him to know that. better than meeting him, I’ve seen his movies.”)

Dart also noted that White had said Baumbach’s mother, former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown, “should have had an abortion.” And, you know, people just expect that kind of thing from White. But did he really say that?

Opening Shots: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Jim Emerson

View image

From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film’s first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down as the earth rises above it, and even more distant, the sun rises above the earth.

All of this happens as “Also sprach Zarathustra” beams in the background, a song and tone poem based on a book that spoke about the journey in the evolution from ape to man to superman. Already, Kubrick is telling us exactly what will happen in the next couple of hours with just the music. The visuals are telling us exactly how his film should be approached: as a slow but massive epic, a film with concepts and visuals that should be pondered and revered, much like one is awed when looking up at the heavens. As an added bonus, the final shot in the film uses the first shot and takes it to the next level.

JE: Right you are, Jonathan. Kubrick composed his films with a thoroughly musical technique unlike any other director I can think of. (I’ve said it before: “Eyes Wide Shut” is ridiculous if seen as a straight narrative [it is, after all, based on a “Traumnovella” — or, “Dream Story”]; it’s magnificent when you look at it as a musical composition, using imagey the way musicians use sounds — thematic statements, colors, tempos, structure, repetition, development, variation…)

When we see the image of the planets and the monolith in alignment at the beginning of the film’s last movement (the psychedelic star trip into inner/outer space), we have that momentous sense that this is the climax of the picture, and it could take us anywhere — even if we don’t understand exactly what’s going on. And then, in the last few moments of the film, the spherical, planet-sized Star Child drifts into view…

I saw “2001” at the Cinerama Theater in Seattle when I was 10 years old. My life has never been the same since. Kubrick finds expression for the mystery and awe of being alive in this universe, at this time, by invoking images of the unimaginably distant past (“The Dawn of Man”) and the unimaginably near future (“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”).

Why the Helvetica is Trajan the movie font?

Jim Emerson

My favorite documentary of 2007 (which I haven’t had a chance to write about yet) is Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica,” a look at a ubiquitous typeface. It’s the kind of movie that helps you to see the world around you anew, freshly attuned to all the fonts in your world. Me, I’m a Helvetica guy. I hate fonts that call attention to themselves, and Helvetica is so clean and strong and elegant you can do almost anything with it just by varying sizes, colors, weights, spacing and placement. Our good friend Larry Adylette, the superlative movie and music and pop culture blogger formerly known as The Shamus (and, before that, That Little Round-Headed Boy), has a few words on Helvetica (and “Helvetica”) over at his new blog, Welcome to L.A. — which is also the title of Alan Rudolph’s funny-peculiar 1976 debut feature, starring Keith Carradine, Sally Kellerman, Harvey Keitel, Sissy Spacek, Lauren Hutton, Geraldine Chaplin, Viveca Lindfors and Richard Baskin. (A parenthetical time-out to say: “Hello, Larry!,” as they used to remark on NBC for a very short time in 1979-80 after McLean Stevenson left “M*A*S*H,” thus providing Garry Shandling with a great network-meeting joke in an early episode of “The Larry Sanders Show.”) Larry writes:

Just like film bloggers who parse every frame of “No Country For Old Men,” these font fanatics have obsessed about every curve and dimension of Helvetica. To them, Helvetica is either a perfect, easily readable form of mass communication or something akin to Anton Chigurh with a coin and an air-tank gun. They are an argumentative, often hilarious bunch…I have no idea what he’s talking about.

But that’s not really the reason for this post. It’s about an entirely different (serif) font, Trajan, which as Kirby Ferguson of Goodie Bag details in the above movie, has become the movie font. “Trajan is the movie font,” he says — and then goes on to show you so many examples your head will spin. In the end, though, like me, he’s a Helvetica guy. Look at those end credits. Not Trajan. Helvetica. I’ll write more about “Helvetica” later, because I’m fascinated with it (the font and the movie) and I already want to see it a third time.

(tip: Ali Arikan)

P.S. Karsten (in comments below) offers an explanation for the film-font phenomenon with a link to this animated murder mystery, “Etched in Stone.” (link opens new browser tab/window)

Opening Shots: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

Jim Emerson

View image: Channnnnnggggggg…

From Sam Goldsmith:

If there is any opening shot that truly shows the power of cinema, it comes from my favorite film, Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night.” After crediting Miramax and Walter Shenson, the film makes a hard edit to John, George, and Ringo cheerfully running from hordes (not a group, hordes) of overzealous fans at Marylebone Station in London. Accompanied by one of the greatest opening chords in rock and roll history, you know that something fun is about to begin.

View image: Down goes George.

Also, notice the fact that George falls down, Ringo tumbles after him, and John turns and laughs. If it were any other film, the makers would probably have them do the shot again, but the spontaneity of that moment and how they react to it is real and joyous. When they finally approach the screen by the end of the shot, the magic of the film starts to weave a spell of euphoria, and we can do nothing else but enjoy the ride.

View image: John cracks up.

From Jerry Matthews, The Salt Shaker, Salt Lake City, UT:

The picture cuts in from black as, on the soundtrack, George Harrison’s jangling 12-string strikes a kinetic opening chord. The four members of The Beatles run towards the camera on the left side of the frame, while the stampede of fans who want to touch them fills all of the narrow street. The cars parked on the street obstruct much of the crowd, suggesting the film’s energetic, impromptu feel.

This show could be your life

Jim Emerson

View image Judge Padma and Junior Chef (and Mad Molecular Gastronomist) Marcel, from Season 2, on location in Hawaii.

Because I enjoy the confessional aspect of blogging, I’m going to admit to you something shocking. It’s shocking to me, anyway. I have fallen under the spell of Bravo’s “Top Chef” program.

Here’s the thing: I don’t normally watch “reality shows” (though I saw the first few “Survivors” and the bizarre American debut season of “Big Brother”) and I don’t cook and I rarely eat in “fine dining” restaurants and I don’t know anything about food.

But I stumbled into one episode by accident, and that led to another, and then I ordered the first two seasons downloaded to my TiVo from Amazon Unbox and plowed through four or five episodes at a time into the wee hours of the morning. The damn show is like a bag of potato chips.

So, why have I gotten into this show so much? Well, for one thing, I like looking at and hearing about the pretty foods and how they got to be that way. (A friend of mine used to enjoy describing recent meals in loving detail. I called him “The Food Descripter” and he went on to work in a top San Francisco restaurant for a while, where writing the menus was one of his specialties.)

The format “is what it is,” to use a favorite expression of the competing cooks. The beats are as comfortable and familiar as those in a genre movie, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. (They also recycle the same few music cues again and again, just like early-’60s Godard and similarly irritating and addictive.)

But most of all, I think, I enjoy watching how the producers develop the characters and shape their relationships into “stories.” Every carefully cut line and selected mannerism — tics, gestures, glances — underlines (and in some cases I mean underlines) which role(s) the individual chefs are supposed to embody: The Outrageously Pretentious Sommelier-Diva-Geek, The Nervous Nelly, The Crunchy Granola Gal, The Egomaniacal Pest Who Annoys Everybody, The Big Sweet Lunk, The Betty Blue Unpredictably Temperamental Foreign Wacko Chick, The Hot-Headed Italian Bulldog Bully, The Mean Mean Bitch Bitch Queen, The Male Model-Lookalike Who Takes Everything Way Way Too Seriously Including Himself, and so on. And, of course, The Guy With The Hair. That one describes at least half the men on the show. I assume the hairdos are good attention-getters when everybody has to wear he same white jackets most of the time.

The cutaways are hilarious, emphasizing each cast member’s most memorable personality quirks over and over and over. The off-set interviews (a staple of MTV’s “The Real World” — oops, I also saw some of those, back in the ’90s) are chopped up like onions and sprinkled through the show. And sometimes they’re supposed to make you cry, too.

Moments Out of Time 2007

Jim Emerson

View image Matt Damon and Julia Stiles scope out the situation in “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson present their much-anticipated annual list of indelible memories-at-24-fps, Moments Out of Time, at MSN Movies. They’ve been sifting through the fragments of movie-time for these shining moments for many years, beginning in Movietone News and continuing through the 1990s in Film Comment.

Beginning when I was in high school, I would read through them religiously, looking for moments I’d treasured, too — or maybe even ones I hadn’t spotted or properly appreciated. Then I’d re-read, again and again, as if I were holding gems to the light and examining them through a magnifying glass, for the sheer pleasure of how they caught the rays. I’d pore over every turn of phrase, teasing out the meanings, even for the movies I hadn’t seen with my own eyes (yet).

Here are a few of my favorites for 2007:

In “Ratatouille,” the remembrance of things past courtesy of the eponymous dish: the critic’s flashback to childhood

When Bourne (Matt Damon) wonders why the CIA operative (Julia Stiles) who once set him up is helping him now, she answers with what passes for a declaration of love in the killing environs of “The Bourne Ultimatum”: “You were … hard for me.” …

In “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” the pebbles sliding away from the vibrating rail as Jesse’s boot rests there, waiting to stop his last train

Leaving her friend to wait out her abortion, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) attends an obligatory birthday party in “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” The camera holds and holds as she sits frozen, claustrophobically hemmed by babbling guests, until she and we nearly explode with tension

The first getting-to-know-you-and-your-music duet in “Once,” one of the purest distillations of rapport ever

In “Starting Out in the Evening,” confronted by a redheaded beauty (Lauren Ambrose), the elderly gentleman (Frank Langella) involuntarily covers his face with his hand — to hide his age or to shield his eyes from her bright heat

Night birds: Chigurh, the raven, and the gunshot reverberating off the otherwise deserted bridge, after which the two bend their separate ways in “No Country for Old Men” …

“There Will Be Blood”: Killing God in a two-lane bowling alley: “I’m finished.”…

Hungry for more? Devour all of ’em here.