Archive for the "Movies" Category

Kwitney Report July 4 Weekend: Bezos and The Birds

In ten years time, will we remember that this was the summer that Lauren Sanchez, the 55-year old fembot-chic journalist, wed Amazon founder and Bond villain lookalike Jeff Bezos, 61, in a lavish damn-the-protestors Venice ceremony? Perhaps in fifty years, when Venice has sunk like Atlantis beneath the double burden of rising oceans and invading tourist hordes, the wedding will be recalled as a Masque of the Red Death turning point. On the bright side, it was nice to see a woman over fifty celebrating her sexuality and embracing glamor. Of course, true elegance only comes with a bit of suffering, like the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, who was proud that she was able to wear twelve oysters clamped to her tail, while other highborn mermaids were permitted only six.

For her part, Sanchez wore many variations on the loose, long hair, shrink-wrapped look that has become popular during Trump’s second Imperial presidency. Sanchez accessorized her many corseted couture creations with the heavily stuffed and lifted Mar a Lago face. Plastic surgery, Botox and fillers, once used sparingly to create a natural effect, have recently become a status symbol — the in-your-face-facelift, as instantly recognizable as a Chanel suit or a Gucci bag. The bride’s actual wedding gown, however, was inspired by Sophia Loren’s high-necked, white lace dress in the 1958 movie Houseboat. The Loren dress was designed by Hollywood legend Edith Head, who has been obsessing me lately. To be honest, 1958 (and ’57 and ’59) have also been obsessing me.

(I’m writing a novel loosely based on my mother’s life with my father during that period, when they lived as young beat intellectuals in the Village.)

Edith Head, who got her initial break at Paramount by bringing in a big portfolio of sketches that belonged to her classmates, went on to design some of the most iconic looks in filmdom: Dorothy Lamour’s island girl sarong; Audrey Hepburn’s beat to glam transformation in Funny Face; Anne Baxter’s sexy Egyptian temptress in the Ten Commandments; and Tippi Hedren’s iconic green suit in The Birds, colored to match the lovebirds that give the plot its initial rom com engine.

Oh, wait, you didn’t realize that The Birds was a rom com, at least for the first half of the movie? Hitchcock was always interested in relationships, sexual tension and the push-and-pull of sexual dynamics, but I can’t think of another film of his that so closely follows the structure of a rom com. Let’s take a look at how The Birds follows the seven classic beats of the rom com, as iterated by Billy Mernit:

The Setup that establishes the protagonist before the potential romantic figure appears and establishes what the protagonist wants…and what he and/or she actually needs:

We begin in San Francisco, with an immaculately coiffed and garbed twenty something blonde striding alone the street. A little boy whistles at her, and she responds with a smile. (This bit was borrowed from a liquid diet drink commercial that starred leading lady Tippi Hedren, but it also establishes her as being NOT TOO STUCK UP and KIND TO KIDS.

Melanie enters a pet shop. She is there to pick up a bird, and when told by the sweet little old lady shopkeeper that it is late, Melanie is cooly displeased, though not cold.

Editor’s note: Evan Hunter, the writer who adapted Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, was the crime writer Ed McBain.

The Meet-Cute which acts as a catalyst for change and conflict and sets the tone for the relationship and story to come.

Melanie’s attitude changes when a ruggedly attractive man enters. Mitch recognizes Melanie from court — he is a lawyer — where she landed when a rich girl prank resulted in damage to property. Mitch decides to provoke Melanie by pretending to mistake her for a shopgirl and asking to see some lovebirds.

Melanie is established as determined, intelligent and resourceful but apparently aimless and impulsive. What she needs is a focus for all her determination and drive. Mitch is also established as intelligent and resourceful (he is a prosecutor and easily captures the escaped bird without harming it). He is also shown to be arrogant and a bit superior, a Darcy type who makes quick judgements about people. Like Darcy, he needs to be more tolerant of people in general and of women in particular.

Melanie, miffed by Mitch’s arrogant tone, decides to prank him by playing along and pretending to work at the store. After Mitch reveals that she is the butt of the joke, an incensed Melanie decides to track him down so that she can deliver the love birds. (The real purpose of this “prank” is to show Mitch that she is more complex than he believes.) In order to pull this prank off, Melanie must act like a detective, tracking down his license plate and calling in favors, further establishing her intelligence, connections, entitlement and determination. Yet when a neighbor informs her that Mitch is gone for the weekend to nearby Bodega Bay, Melanie shows she is not the kind of person who would abandon a helpless creature.

Determined to complete her mission, she drives the birds to the small coastal town, interviews a shopkeeper to find out the location of Mitch’s house and then follows up by interviewing the local schoolteacher, Annie, to find out the name of his young sister. We learn that Annie also followed Mitch from San Francisco, hoping for their romance to turn into more. Melanie then rents a boat and pilots it across the bay to deliver the lovebirds.

It is at this point that we realize that Melanie is not just a little determined and resourceful — she is action movie hero level determined and resourceful. Mitch spots her in the boat.

Sexy Complication/Turning Point: There’s attraction, but either an external obstacle or an internal one stand in the way of consummation.

Melanie gets attacked by a seagull, giving Mitch a chance to tend to her while they spar and spark. They establish that she loathes him and he wants to put all practical jokers in jail while he tends her bird injury. As the prosecutor tries to force her to admit she came all this way just for him, Melanie pretends that she was coming to Bodega Bay anyway — to visit Annie, whom she claims is an old college friend.

Mitch, attracted to Melanie, invites her to stay for his sister’s birthday party. Before the party, however, he makes it clear that he desires Melanie but does not respect her. She turns him down (“that might have been good enough for me last year in Rome. It isn’t now”) and returns to Annie’s, where she is renting a room for the night. Annie reveals her own history with Mitch, the trouble with his mother (possessive and insecure since her husband died four years earlier) and also that she moved here not to be with him but to escape the private school where she was teaching little girls…like Melanie. She wants to teach students with less entitlement. Mitch calls and apologizes to Melanie, and she agrees to come the next day to Cathy’s party. Annie completes her transformation from potential rival to sidekick by helping Melanie decide that yes, she really does want to go.

The Hook: Midpoint. For reasons, however (forced proximity) the two cannot simply bid each other adieu. Forced proximity causes: Kidnapping, shared job or project or goal; someone is sick and requires tending; someone is in danger and requires protecting; weather issues and natural calamity; war and human calamity.

At Cathy’s party, there is a bird attack. (I have omitted all the skillful seeding of OMINOUS BIRD STUFF that has been going on since the film’s opening shot.)

Swivel/Second Turning Point: Protagonist must choose between initial goal (what he or she wants) and true love (what he or she needs).

The next morning, Lydia (Mitch’s mother) takes Cathy over to Annie’s house, leaving Mitch and Melanie alone. She is in her floral muumuu and no makeup. (Ah, the sex appeal of a shapeless muumuu! I am a huge proponent, as was my mother before me and my daughter after me.) They also conjecture about the cause of the bird attack (in the script, Melanie jokes a prophet sparrow with a long beard is stirring them all up to overthrow human rule). We see how well-matched they are, in their cleverness and their sudden vulnerability to each other.

Dark Moment/Crisis: Protagonist has made a choice, and now — disaster! He or she or they will lose both what they originally wanted AND true love.

The birds attack the schoolhouse this time. Annie and Cathy flee to her house, while Melanie goes to the town to call her father from the cafe. I’ve lost track of where Mitch is at this point — presumably with his mother and the police officer, as his mother found another bird victim when she went to his farm earlier. In any case, the bird attacks change the stakes from losing a chance at love and a more authentic life to losing one’s life. Yet while another woman tries to escape back to San Francisco, Melanie stays put, choosing to meet the danger with Mitch and his young sister and mother. In this section, Annie dies, sacrificing herself to save Cathy.

Editor’s note: In a rom com, especially a rom com novel, Annie wouldn’t be dead — she would be sequel bait, possibly in a story that covers the same time period but features Annie as the protagonist. But wait a second…is she really dead? We don’t see her face, and Mitch never takes her pulse. At Melanie’s prompting, he carries Annie inside. I prefer to believe that Annie wasn’t really dead, just unconscious, and covered with copious blood from a head wound. In fact, I’m tempted to write a whole secondary love story for Annie, who was clearly a beatnik in San Francisco (her dark hair is worn very naturally wavy, and she favors a dark eye, lighter lip and mock dark turtleneck look that evokes beat culture). Annie is clearly having her earthy hands-in-the-soil phase in Bodega Bay, and still carrying a torch for Mitch. Is she staying in the mistaken belief that she might win him over by winning over his mother? Is Melanie’s reckless cool the catalyst Annie needs to let go of Mitch and also to stop trying to be so good and domestic that Mitch’s mother will no longer see her as a threat? Annie has some serious sequel bait potential here. But who could be Annie’s love interest: Sebastian the salty boat captain from the cafe? Deke the sensitive cafe owner? Maybe a little tug of love between the two men?

Okay, just checked…there was a 1994 made for TV sequel, but it did not tell Annie’s story.

Climax: Fight or Flight: Hero or heroine or both must confront their biggest fear and actively pursue the love interest or fight for them or both.

Holed up in the house, Mitch falls asleep and Melanie goes alone to investigate a sound from the attic, where she is attacked and nearly killed by birds. Her near-death is the catalyst to her being accepted by Mitch’s mother, Lydia.

Joyful Defeat: Resolution: Hero and heroine (or hero and hero and heroine and heroine) reconcile and reunite, for the moment, for now or forever, in a happy ending that may contain some poignant, bittersweet elements.

Mitch, Melanie, his mother and sister all bundle into the car to drive off to San Francisco…with the lovebirds.

Annie’s story — I refuse to believe that she’s dead — has yet to be told. Oh, by the way, July 4 is the PERFECT time to watch or rewatch The Frogs, a perfectly terrible ANIMALS GONE BAD move from the seventies.

Finding Dory: What Makes a Sequel Work?

FindingDory_Wide

Finding Dory is a sequel that is worth your time — even if you don’t remember all the details of Finding Nemo, (released thirteen long years ago, in 2003).

The reason: Like all good sequels, and all good works of genre, it delivers the same thing as before, only different.

Like Nemo, Dory is the story of a search for absent family. It contains many of the same Hero’s Journey plot elements, and many of the same sorts of antic chase scenes.

Yet Dory still explores new territory, and does so with bravery.

Like the film Me Before You, Finding Dory addresses the issues of the differently abled. The main character, Dory, has memory issues; Destiny, a whale shark, is severely nearsighted (as someone who would be legally blind without glasses, this resonates); Hank, the octopus, has lost a tentacle; and Bailey the Beluga has sustained a head injury and cannot echolocate.

Of course, Nemo himself has a short fin.

Unlike Me Before You, however, Dory is unlikely to create controversy, (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/15/quadriplegic-author-francesco-clark-angry-associated-me-before-you  ) as the story’s underlying message is one of persistence, resilience and the power of optimism to keep us bouyant in the face of adversity.

Dory’s writer, Andrew Stanton, must know how easy it is to become discouraged: In 2012, his live action directorial debut, John Carter of Mars, was a flop.

Coming back to Pixar to create the sequel to Finding Nemo should have been easy for Stanton. According to him, it wasn’t.

“I had always seen Dory as a tragic character,” he has been quoted as saying. “I had always assumed she had spent most of her life wandering the ocean being ditched or accidentally ditching other people and had this compounding sense of abandonment. I figured she had developed this superpower of being the most optimistic, nice, fun person to be around so maybe the next person — or fish — she meets won’t leave her.”

So how do you write a children’s movie about a tragic character who is unfailingly optimistic and kind?

The answer is: You don’t. Like Toy Story, Wall-E, and Finding Nemo, Finding Dory is not a children’s movie. It is an animated movie, which children tend to like, and there is no explicit sex or violence in it, which parents do not like to see in the films they show their young children.

But Finding Dory’s story is structured along the lines of a psychological thriller. Like Girl On a Train, we have an unreliable narrator who must discover clues and fill in the gaps in her own memory in order to solve a mystery in her past.

In real life, a person who cannot form short term memories would not be able to recover long-term memories, but Dory’s character feels authentic, in large part because her struggle does have a real life analog — the cognitive declines of old age and dementia.

So Dory randomly recalls childhood memories or quirky facts, while she struggles to recall what just happened a moment ago. She is charismatic and creative, but has difficulty performing simple spatial tasks, and is constantly in danger of losing, not only others, but herself.

It is this last aspect of Dory which sets her story apart from Nemo’s. In Finding Nemo, Marlin, Nemo’s father, was the character whose goal provided the spine of the story. According to Stanton, Marlin’s defining goal was this: To prevent harm. To prevent harm to his son, and to any one else he cared about.

Dory’s goal is different. She may be looking for her parents, but her great overarching goal is simply to hold on to herself. How much can she forget without forgetting the essential connections that form her identity? In the film’s darkest moment, where Dory confronts her greatest fear, she nearly gives into despair — losing what Stanton calls “her superpower” of optimism. This scene is done with such subtlety and stillness that it elevates the entire film.

If this makes the film sound serious and preachy, it’s not. There are moments of delirious fun, including an oblique Cthulhu reference early in the movie and Hank the octopus’ brilliant physical humor and gruff asides (he is voiced by Ed O’Neill, who is known for many other things, but whom I will always adore as Relish the Troll King from Tenth Kingdom). There’s also a touch tank that is depicted as the final circle of Hell, a lonely clam who won’t shut up, and a cameo appearance by a same sex couple of women with a baby. (There seems to be some dispute over whether the couple are meant to be lesbians. I choose to believe they are, because it’s about time.)

In his 2012 Ted Talk, (just after the release of the ill-fated John Carter) Stanton lays out some guidelines for good storytelling. It’s very worth watching (if only for that first crude joke): https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story?language=en

I suggest turning on the subtitles so you can jot down some notes. Here are some of his key points, in my own words:

Storytelling has guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Instinct will often guide you as well as analysis. (That’s how he and his friends started out at Pixar.)

Storytelling is joke telling. Everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal (the punchline). David Mamet agrees: In his book, On Directing Film, he states that the model for drama is the dirty joke.

Storytelling without dialogue is the purest andmost inclusive storytelling. David Mamet talks about telling the story through a series of uninflected images. A shot of a baby bird on the beach. A shot of the ocean. A shot of a big wave coming. A shot of the older birds running away. You tell the story in the cuts (the juxtaposition of images) and let the viewer make the connection. (Mamet is citing Eisenstein’s theory of montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXFSBlQOe4)

The audience actually wants to work for their meal; they just don’t want to know that they’re doing that. The reason: We’re born problem solvers. We’re born to deduce and to deduct, because that’s what we do in real life. This leads to what Stanton calls the Unifying Theory: Don’t give the audience 4, give them 2+2 and let them make the connection.

The appeal of puppies and kittens (and cartoons and animation): Puppies and kittens can’t completely express what their thoughts and intentions are, and it’s like a magnet. We can’t stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses how abstract forms (such as comics and cartoons) can create greater audience identification and have a more universal appeal than realistic characters. We humans may not be as color blind as we would like to be yet, but we can all see ourselves in a blue fish.

Creating Characters that Make People Care: You want to create a character that a reader or viewer will care about, but you also need to create an arc. How to reconcile these often contradictory goals? Stanton suggests that you don’t need to start a character at one end of the spectrum (selfish) and travel all the way to the other end (selfless) in order to create an arc. We all have conditions. Figure out the one condition that a character must see met in order to function…and then take it away.

Last but not least, Stanton does not give in to the temptation to preach about the impact of climate change, overfishing and pollution on our oceans. (Dory does get stuck in a plastic six pack ring, but it is not a major plot point.)

Stanton’s final words of wisdom: “I’m a very selfish storyteller. I just want whatever works to help tell the character’s story. I don’t have a secret agenda.”

Bring out the Females and the Young!

One of the things I love about romance: Female characters drive the action. This shouldn’t seem like a revolutionary idea, but over at the Cineplex, all the action films have state of the art special effects and female characters that might as well be wearing bouffants and pearls. Take Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. There is a lot of talk about “the females and the young,” as in, “Leave the females and the young” and “oh, no, the females and the young!” The human and simian females don’t have a lot to do, acting-wise, besides looking all Susie Sad Eyes at their heroic man and apefolk. Yeah, sure, the main human female character is supposedly a doctor who worked for the CDC, but all she actually gets to do in the film is open a bag and pull out some medicine (without asking any questions about her patient’s condition. If that’s CDC protocol, that explains how the simian flu wiped out the human population).

The problem here is that the writers thought that telling us that the character is a doctor makes her seem more competent and intelligent. It doesn’t. You need to show a character using medical skills to make them seem competent.

And it’s very satisfying, watching characters display competence.

The original Planet of the Apes, which came out in 1968, was a lot less sexist. Dr. Zira played a pivotal role and displayed intelligence, competence and bravery. In fact, she took the lead in confronting orangutan scientific authority, backed up by her husband. (The original novel, by the way, was written by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge over the River Kwai).Sexism! How human!
What do you mean, our roles are smaller in the reboot?