Vanity Fair.com‘s Jason Zinoman recently went the distance with Robert McKee‘s screenwriting course. He was”genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting,” he writes, “but also, as a critic — and a specialist of horror movies — with a professional interest in McKee’s theories about genre and narrative.”
Legendary screenwriting guru Robert McKee
“By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary. The emperor here is not naked, but he is showing some skin through his loosely tied robe, and when the subject turns to horror, the silky-smooth garment collapses around his ankles.”
You can respond to Fantastic Mr. Fox as an auteurist thing — a dazzling and charming representation of the mind and spirit and stylistic exactitude of director Wes Anderson — and as a movie you pay to see with an $8 tub of popcorn in your lap. I responded to it both ways — in effect with two heads. Which left me feeling great and not-so-great.
I loved and worshipped the auteurist aspect — the luscious autumnal colors, the every-other-frame movement that Anderson and his team used to create Fox’s particular stop-motion look, the “moving” fox hair that resulted from this, the deadpan Anderson humor, Mr. Fox’s courdoroy wardrobe, the tasteful pop-tune soundtrack (Brian Wilson‘s “Heroes and Villains,” “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”) and all the other typical Andersonian goodies. But I was unmoved and even disappointed by the campfire movie aspect.
The fact that 95% or 96% of the paying public will be responding to the latter and not caring all that much about the former (despite the fact that the elites — guys like Kent Jones, Village Voice critic Scott Foundas, New York‘s David Edelstein and New Yorker critic/columnist Richard Brody, among several others — are tickled with delight) may result in a commercial problem for 20th Century Fox, the distributor.
Edelstein calls it “a dandy’s movie,” and that it is. Which, as noted, is what gives my inner movie dweeb such pleasure. I intend to buy, watch and occasionally re-watch the Fantastic Mr. Fox Bluray when it comes out next year. But most American moviegoers are not dandies. They’re slugs and lugs, and I know, trust me, what’s going to happen when they watch it on screens this weekend.
It’ll be the same reaction I was sensing from the swells last month during the London Film Festival premiere in Leicester Square. During the early stages they’re going to go “yeah, yeah, this is glorious, really good, immaculate craft, wonderful colors and details” and so on, but somewhere around the 45- or 60-minute mark they’re going to begin saying to themselves, “Wait a minute, what is this? Nothing’s happening. It’s staying on the same level.”
The bottom-line thematic truth about Fantastic Mr. Fox is that it’s about as deep as a Road Runner cartoon. It’s all about how it looks and sounds and how they made it, and nothing about what it actually is. It’s pure Wes, pure whimsy, pure style, pure technique, pure stone-skimming-across-the pond. I get it and I love it, but my inner meathead was saying “yeah, and so what?”
Based on the Roald Dahl children’s book, Fantastic Mr. Fox is about the troubles and turmoils that befall a sophisticated adult fox (George Clooney‘s Mr. Fox) and his family (Meryl Streep, Jason Schartzman) when he decides that a life as a gentleman newspaper columnist isn’t enough — he must revert to raiding coops and eating chickens.
Mr. Fox and and his opossum friend Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) decide to raid the farms and warehouses of three ruthless agribusiness types — Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon). The story is basically about Fox and friends enjoying the upper hand against these three, and then Boggis, Bunce and Bean striking back with machine guns and John Deere super-diggers and whatnot, and then the Fox clan figuring some way around their latest maneuver, etc.
Except it’s not “real.” The immutable laws of probability and outcome don’t apply. No foxes get killed despite ridiculous automatic-weapons odds against them. (It’s a little bit like Sylvester Stallone never being winged in Rambo II.) Life can sometimes be brutal in actuality and sometimes very tough decisions have to be made, and sometimes people stumble and fall and die and go to jail, but in Fantastic Mr. Fox life is an ironic bullshit thing…a hip romp…a lightweight goof.
Mr. Fox is chicken-raiding behind the back of Mrs. Fox (Streep) as he’s promised her he won’t attack and slaughter any more, despite the fact that he and Mrs. Fox are shown doing a chicken-raid in the opening scene. Presumably Mr. Fox collects a handsome salary as a newspaper columnist (enough to afford a nice home inside a big tree) and when it comes to vittles he and Mrs. Fox presumably go to a fox supermarket to buy frozen chicken paties. The main point is that hunting is out.
Except none of this is explained or explored, and it struck me as more than a little bit wacko. The common lore of foxes is that of chicken-coop raiders — it’s what they do. (They actually hunt and eat rodents, snakes, you name it. They eat about 2 pounds of food each day.) So what kind of screwy-headed fox wife tells her fox husband that he has to give up chickens, like he’s some kind of alcohol or gambling or oxycontin addict? I don’t get it. In fact, I reject it. It’s just not a very persuasive or compelling story.
I mean, what’s the metaphor here? That it’s cool to be a thief, or that thieves have to be true to their natures? That it’s good to have family and friends to help you steal chickens and apple cider? I didn’t hate the story but what is it? Nothing, really.
In short the Fantastic Mr. Fox style is great to savor in dozens of aesthetic ways, as noted, but in rudimentary terms it’s just a mild-mannered outdoor Anderson picnic. It’s Clooney having fun portraying a canny, urbane, ethically-challenged fox and Schwartzman doing his usual young-neurotic guy, nobody-values-me shtick. And Murray being glib and cool. And Owen Wilson coming in for a brief cameo, and Anderson voicing a weasel, and Willem Dafoe playing a rat.
Compare the whimsy in Fantastic Mr. Fox to the rich thematic delivery in WALL*E or Up or The Incredibles, and you’re talking about a very minor thing. I’m sorry but the Anderson decline continues. I want that old Bottle Rocket/Rushmore current back. And if I can’t have that I want more than just dandified style. I want Wes to remake Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend, or make some kind of 21st Century film noir or….I don’t know but some kind of bold-swan-dive-into-fresh-territory type of film.
Honestly — if Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn’t directed by Anderson and didn’t feature the voices of Clooney, Streep, Schwratzman and Bill Murray (playing a badger), would anyone be paying attention to a film like this at all? I wonder.
And yet I love the way it’s all been done. It’s a huge kick on that level. Really. So if you can watch it from that inner sanctum and stay there and keep yourself from slipping into a sweaty and bothered state after the 45-minute mark (like me), you’ll have a very cool time with it. And you can meet Kent Jones and David Edelstein and Scott Foundas and Richard Brody for drinks afterwards. Cool all around. Movie happiness is where you find it.
A small but bothersome issue in Fantastic Mr. Fox is the refusal of Wes Anderson to give his foxes bent hind legs, like all canines have, even cartoon versions. Anderson’s foxes walk around with straight legs and essentially stand — or more accurately balance themselves — on the pads of their tiny fox feet. Which aren’t large or broad enough to maintain an easy, natural balance, so all the foxes appear to be ballet dancers, in effect — stepping around on their tippy toes. All Wes had to do was give them bent hind legs and I would’ve bought it. I would’ve understood and accepted the balance aspect.
The about-to-open Fantastic Mr. Fox shows that director Wes Anderson (a) remains one of the 21st Century’s most assertive auteurist filmmakers, which is a glorious thing from a certain perspective, and yet (b) at the same time is trapped in this auteurist-mindset mode. A little more than two years ago I wrote a column, inspired by a dream, that suggested how Wes could free himself from the Andersonville gulag. I’m re-running it today as a follow-up to my Fantastic Mr. Fox review:
DVD frame-capture from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
Dreams never seem as profound the next morning as they do when they’re running in your sleep, but I had a lulu last night that, if listened to and boldly acted upon, might lead to the resurrection of Wes Anderson‘s career with a single mad sweep of the brush and a sudden screech of tires.
What Anderson needs to do more than anything else right now is to blow up “Andersonville,” that specially styled, ultra-hermetic world that his films and characters reside in. Being Wes, he naturally needs to do it with style. And the best way to do this, I’m convinced, is to make an arty black comedy about the world coming to an end on the rural two-lane blacktops, highways and freeways of America.
Anderson, in short, needs to reimagine and then remake Jean-Luc Godard‘s Weekend.
The original 1967 film, an allegory about the breakdown of civilization illustrated by traffic jams, random violence and bloody car crashes, is regarded by some as Godard’s finest.
I saw shots from Anderson’s Weekend in the dream, and that carefully choreo- graphed, super-manicured visual quality he brings to each and every scene in his films would, I believe, work perfectly with a vision of death, anarchy and twisted metal on the road. The film was fully completed in the dream (I saw it in a small red screening room in Paris, sitting in a large velvet armchair), and it was great viewing.
As I watched Anderson’s camera track along the highway and gaze at the flaming SUVs and scooters and bodies of Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Anjelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman lying every which way I knew I was seeing a kind of genius. I was awestruck. Only a madman would have made such a film in the wake of The Darjeeling Limited, and I was filled with respect for Anderson’s artistic courage.
I’m not saying Anderson’s Weekend would be commercial or even critically hailed. But after making such a film, Anderson would be free. He would no longer be the guy with the Dalmatian mice and the pet cobras and the velvet curtains and the characters lugging around specially-designed suitcases with all the Kinks and Rolling Stones and Nico songs on the soundtrack.
It is widely agreed by movie cognescenti that Anderson has allowed his films to be consumed by a deadpan mannerist attitude along with a certain style-and-design mania, which Esquire‘s David Walters believes has devolved from a signature into “schtick.” By making movies about “world-weary fellows” with money “who hurl non-sequiturs and charm with endearing peccadilloes and aberrant behavior” in a world-apart realm, he has painted himself into a corner.
Only a radical new turn can free Wes from his effete parlor passions. If not a Weekend remake then something equally nutso. He has to say to his audience (and himself), “To hell with this world I’ve made for myself. I am no longer the maestro of that tweedle-dee symphony. I am a new man on an untravelled path.”
Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland looks like the one I had in my head when it was first read to me when I was, like, five or six. I suspect that Burton was drawing from the same kind of well when he began to create the film. There’s a Tim Burton drawn-art exhibit kicking off at MOMA on Tuesday, 11.17,
IFC Films has acquired North American rights to Jordan Scott‘s Cracks, a somewhat bent and frenzied thriller staring Eva Green, Juno Temple, Imogen Poots and Maria Valverde. I talked with a couple of acqusitions guys about Cracks during the Toronto Film festival. They were chortling and snorting and going “whooo!” Lots of merriment and not much belief that it was any kind of “audience” film. Which is okay with me.
Variety‘s Todd McCarthycalledCracks “a drear account of adolescent reveries gone south [that] plays like a cross between Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, shot through with a nasty Lord of the Flies streak.
“Debuting feature director Jordan Scott does a reasonable job of conjuring up a hothouse atmosphere in a depressing English boarding school circa 1934, but the psychological and latent erotic aspects remain largely undeveloped. Eva Green’s star turn in an exotic role will be enough to win the film a berth in most markets, but theatrical flight looks to be short, with better results in ancillary.”
What exactly will Scott Foundas‘s appointment as associate program director of the NY Film Festival mean? He’ll be handling series and event programs, and good for that — Foundas is a very bright and knowledgable and plugged-in guy. I’ve seen him interview several distinguished filmmakers in various venues, and few are better at it than he.
On the other hand Foundas did trash A Serious Man in Film Comment and was one of those NYFF programmers who stood in the way of screening it at last month’s festival. So as Anthony Quinn‘s Auda Abu Tayi said of Peter O’Toole‘s T.E. Lawrence, “He is not…perfect.”
And I don’t know to what extent, if any, Foundas’s appointment will influence the general programming choices of the NYFF, which is currently regarded as the most elitist (i.e., indifferent to popular tastes), Trappist monk-minded, granola-and-goat’s-milk flavored of all the prominent second-tier festivals. The only way the NYFF could truly be transformed…naah, forget it. It can’t happen. The NYFF has carved out a rep as one of the dweebiest operations in the world, and why should they give up that handle? It’s been hard won.
Foundas will move to New York, which means unless he’s being paid a huge salary that he’s probably going to have to suffer for many weeks as he looks for a decent place to live, and at the end of the process he’ll choose a place that’s much smaller than the one he had/has in Los Angeles.
I’ve just watched the first half of the new Gone With The Wind Bluray, and I’m truly dazzled. No, levitated. This is by far the most beautifully rendered old-time Technicolor film I’ve ever seen on a high-def system — razor-sharp, pulsing with color, pretty close to grain-free and significantly upgraded over the 2004 DVD version, which was excellent for what it was.
I haven’t talked to Robert Harris or George Feltenstein or anyone else in the know, but I do know what my eyes tell me. This Gone With The Wind is amazing — a candy-store Technicolor eye-bath like nothing I’ve ever sunk into before. The key element is “next to no grain.” I haven’t come up with a term that conveys the opposite of a “grainstorm” but this delivers that. Hallelujah — somebody finally heard!
The grain levels are roughly at par with WHV’s Casablanca Bluray, which didn’t have a digitally scrubbed-down look but a naturally clean quality. Why didn’t WHV deliver the same nearly-grain-free quality (or an approximation of same) in the sepia-tone sections of The Wizard of Oz?
My approving-but-not-exactly-blown-away reactions to Warner Home Video’s other two “Murderer’s Row” Blu-ray titlles — Oz and North by Northwest — led me to expect that GWTW would be of a similar quality, which is to say noticably but not mind-blowingly better than the last DVD. Riper, sharper and more fully rendered, okay, but not in a way that would make anyone gasp or drop their pants. Well, the GWTW Blu-ray is a serious gasper and pants-dropper.
That’s all I’m going to say for now except that for my money DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze was too restrained in his recent review of this disc. He said that “there are times when it makes you gasp” and that “detail advances to as high a degree as we are likely to see for this 70-year old classic,” okay. But he didn’t convey sufficient excitement. He didn’t jump and down and say “this is the kind of Blu-ray of a Hollywood golden-age film that you’ve always dreamed of but not never quite saw.”
Food fair off Fifth Ave. on 56th or 55th. A guy selling hot sausage and onion sandwiches had the temerity to charge $10. I would have gone to $5 or $6 bucks in a stretch, but $10? Get outta town. Wednesday, 11.11., 11:0 am.
I ran into Men Who Stare at Goats director-writer Grant Heslov on 10.13 at the opening-night party for the London Film Festival. He had flown up from Italy with George Clooney, the star of Anton Corbijn‘s then-shooting The American, of which Heslov is one of the producers. It’s about an asssassin (Clooney) hanging back and chilling down in a Southern Italian village as he prepares for the proverbial final assignment while coping with a romantic entanglement and local friendships, etc.
You know what this sounds like? Local Hero with high-powered rifles and scopes and silencers.
I told Heslov I was especially excited to see this film because of my delight with the visual compositions in Corbijn’s last film, Control. I asked if there’s any chance that The American is being shot in black-and-white. “Nope,” said Heslov, faintly amused.
