Life of Pi and other movies inside my head. It's a zoo in there.

My head is all ascramble. Last thing I know I was boozing it up with Joaquin* Suddenly I'm waking up adrift in the ocean** with only my beloved dog***, who I'd just brought back from the dead ****, and a fierce Bengal tiger for company. All of this while trying to chase and kill an older version of myself from the future ***** ! 

Which movies are jostling around inside your head right now vying for attention? Which one is winning?

* The Master ** Life of Pi *** Bwakaw **** Frankenweenie ****** Looper 
(Thoughts coming on all of those pictures -- a streak of happy moviegoing -- though not in that order as soon as I can collect myself.)

P.S. I'm aware that I'm burying the headline which is that I've just seen Life of Pi. Judging on the joygasms on twitter, it looks like a critical crowdpleaser and a bonafide Oscar contender. I was less ecstatic but boy does it look good. Cinematography nomination #2 for Claudio Miranda (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) coming right up. Yes, I'll update the Oscar charts this weekend. A lot of adjustments are due from shifting release dates and buzz.

Two Tolands

Matt here. Earlier, I wrote about Gregg Toland as Teresa Wright’s accomplice in manufacturing the luminance of William Wyler’s 1946 film, Best Years of Our Lives. If anyone is unfamiliar with Toland’s name, you’ve certainly seen his work. He’s the cinematographer responsible for Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, Wuthering Heights, and The Grapes of Wrath. He could be considered as much of an auteur as many of the great directors, leaving a fairly recognizable stamp on anything bearing his name. Orson Welles cemented his legacy when he decided to share his title card with Toland at the end of Kane.

Anyway, Toland came to mind earlier and it made me think about how, among his innumerable virtues, his most important skill was his ability to adapt. It’s fascinating to see how his trademarks (deep focus, risky lighting, etc.) shifted to suit whatever director he worked with.

Deep focus existed before Toland, but he taught the world to see it as an extension of the cinematic language. As the best filmmakers do, he used the camera to define the emotional implications of the script. In Citizen Kane, Toland’s methods suggested the deep tragedy of the film and helped the audience to understand Charles Foster Kane merely by looking at him. You could probably watch Kane on mute and still comprehend the characterization.

At his best, Toland told the story with his camera. Deep focus is used to isolate characters in Kane – detailing their proportion to the world around them. Characters occupy different parts of the screen depending their emotional status. But in Best Years of Our Lives, deep focus is used to bring characters together.

By the time The Best Years of Our Lives rolled around, Toland was secure in his technique. His impeccable style and clarity adjusted to combine brilliantly with William Wyler's organizational fixation. When Al returns home and so timidly walks into his own home (after ringing the doorbell, no less), he embraces his wife about 20 feet away from the camera, down a long hallway. They are nicely in focus and so are their children, standing 5 feet away.

By comparing Toland's use of deep focus in Best Years of Our Lives with something like Kane, we begin to notice how his gift wasn't only in choosing lenses – it was in his wisdom of when and how to use them. With Wyler, Toland used the device to synchronize with his organizational instinct and his obsession with neatness. Welles, on the other hand, encouraged deep focus to occupy a component of Kane's megalomania, to follow him down the barrel of the gun. Same method. Two wildly different results.

To Our San Francisco Readers

I lost my ship."

See it Tuesday night (tomorrow) and report back!

♥ the Castro Theatre.

Best Shot: "How to Marry a Millionaire"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot, our series in which all participating movielovers argue for what is a particular movie's best shot, just keeps on surprising me. I've learned so much about the movies by doing it: what I personally respond to, how often a single image is dependent on the editing around it or the scenes preceding it for its punch, and that the most brilliant images tend to either define an entire movie OR illuminate a very particular piece of its identity. Best of all, I've learned things I couldn't have learned without an extra set of eyeballs... yours. Last week, for example, I came to appreciate The Royal Tenenbaums, in whole new ways via the posts on other blogs. Which is why I'm super anxious to read this week's entries. Because this week's movie, the romantic comedy How To Marry a Millionaire (1953) which was a favorite of mine as a teenager, left me very uninspired. I hadn't remembered how unambitious the visuals were, lazily trusting that Cinemascope would provide us with terrific images.

Which is, come to think of it, what many filmmakers did in the early days of Cinemascope. I've joked before that rectangles > squares but shapes are neutral. It's up to the filmmaker to know what to use a movie's shape for, be that square or rectangular or circle (should the movies ever get round)

So my choice for best shot makes good use of the Cinemascope. The Cinemascope allows this image above to be expansive while the blocking reveals a tight trap. The moment  comes early in the movie when the three golddiggers (Marilyn Monroe as "Pola", Betty Grable as "Loco", and Lauren Bacall as "Shatze"-- delicious character names!) think they've snared their first 'bear', a millionaire by the name of J.D. (William Powell, extremely well cast). The girls aren't greedy *cough* and have already agreed that even just one millionaire will do.

You only need one!

For a brief flash with all their backs are turned to the camera, it's easy to imagine a much creepier movie wherein the ladies pounce in for the kill. They're essentially predators, after all, sexy spiders slinking around their phony web (Manhattan condo with terrace) for billionaire flies.

While How to Marry is good popcorn fun, especially for Monroe's adorkable blind as a bat insecurities and Bacall's elegant snobbery as she looks down her nose at everyone and everything (including herself!), it's not much more than that. It feels padded even at only an hour and a half (is it the weirdly sleepy editing?) and the visuals are the least interesting thing about it. This is the only film we've covered where I had absolutely zero indecision about which shot to use. I'm a sucker for a continuous shot and if How to Marry's collection of them didn't feel so much like a filmed stage play (I actually wanted more cutting; that's so weird for me) they'd be a lot more exciting. But this one is a keeper. The middle 'backs to the camera' bit when the ladies pander to and coo at the squirming millionaire is perfect. The cherry on top is that the shot (and scene) ends with a delicious triple diva walk to the camera, all three stars really giving it to the camera... in character no less!

I think this is it kids, a great big room filled with nothing but rich millionaires. And us."

How To Discover Great Blogs (2012)
[Hint: click on them] 
Against the Hype Monroe, Gable and Bacall existing in the same universe?
Amiresque gets dreamy with Betty Grable 
Antagony & Ecstacy a passing of the sex goddess torch
Armchair Audience Bacall sure can move across a screen. But does she choose the right man?
Dial P For Popcorn moments that stick with you
Encore's World in most intrigued by the revealing shots of the threesome.
Film Actually Best Shot = Best Comic Timing
Movies Kick Ass 'there's no business like men business'

Final Three Episodes of Season Three:
Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr (August 8th), Singin' in the Rain (August 15th), and Dog Day Afternoon (August 22nd). JOIN US. WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE AS BEST SHOT?

Best Shot: "The Royal Tenenbaums"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series anything with a webspace is invited to join us in choosing a single "best" shot from pre-selected films.

When I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, I loved it but wondered quietly if it didn't lose a little steam as it went. That'd be a bittersweet but fitting artistic fate for a movie that's about a family of child prodigies who can't escape the long shadows of their early promise and exist in a kind of static bewilderment at their present emotional state(s). As it turns out The Royal Tenenbaums, unlike the Tenenbaum children, only improves with age. It's looking more and more like Wes Anderson's indisputable masterpiece.

Still, it's easy to see where my initial feeling sprang from. The movie opens so well, with unimproveable voiceover work by Alec Baldwin (clinically observant but never unfeeling) detailing the overachieving childhoods of Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), followed by endearingly deadpan "22 years later" character cards that it just has to be downhill from there? 

Not so.

The movie keeps reintroducing us this eccentric troubled clan. I don't normally choose iconic familiar shots as "best" both out of fear of cliché and out of the archaeological instincts of the cinephile -- always looking for new things to admire in a beloved film. But I give up here. Whenever I think of The Royal Tenenbaums, I think of Margot and the greenline bus.

We've already met Margot twice: Once as a precocious unhappy child playwright. Then as a beautiful miserable adult in a brilliant two-part scene wherein Anderson invites us to compare the omniscient narrator's observations about Margot with her detached relationship to her husband (Bill Murray, besotted and baffled and hilarious) and her instant regression with her endlessly supportive mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston, perfect throughout). "Why does he get to do that?" Margot whines about her brother moving back home.

This, my choice for Best Shot is our third major introduction.

With each introduction Anderson gives us not just more character details, but reenforcing self-referential humor (how great is the "no smoking" sign on the bus in a scene that at first feels devoid of the usual cluttered wit of the Anderson frame?), and fresh ways of thinking about these indelible characters. In our third introduction, though we're already as baffled by her as Raleigh and as worried for her as Etheline, we're suddenly seeing her through Richie's eyes; her sad-eyed beauty is intact but she's lit up by sunshine and meant to be loved obsessively... or even incestuoustly. Who can blame Richie? 

The movie's obsessive accumulation of introductions, its front loaded feeling, are a gorgeous almost spiritual mirror to the Tenenbaums own experience, continual promise trapped in static adolescent pain. It takes something as jarring as weddings and deaths to nudge them forward.

These are the other two shots I considered, both of them because of Margot. In truth when I'm watching the movie it feels perfectly balanced as an ensemble piece (and I love every character... especially Pagoda and Etheline) but outside of the actual experience of watching it, Margot tends to absorb my imagination.

Wes Anderson understands, as too few modern directors do, that two, three, four and even five-shots can sometimes give you more information about a single character than a closeup of that same character can; you need to see how they fit into the world they live in. Margot internalizes her otherness as the adopted child and the movie beautifully finds its way in to this girl's notoriously secretive headspace.

This view of Margot apart from her family is repeated in the hospital scene where she leans against a door while the other characters huddle near Richie's bed, barraging him with questions about his suicide attempt. She's inside the "Recovery Room" but she's not healing.

Of course it's dark, it's a suicide note."

This time Wes Anderson and his cinematographer Robert Yeoman move the camera in for a heartbreak closeup. Margot is further away from Richie than anyone in the room but she's the closest to him. They're just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that.

Armchair Audience [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome!]
For Your Speculation [Best Shot First Timer. Welcome !]
Intifada "died tragically rescuing his family..."
Serious Film "wounded zebra"
Antagony & Ecstasy "in all honesty, my second favorite shot"
Amiresque 
Low Resolution "...well, it can't be very good for your eyes anyway"
Okinawa Assault
Film Actually [Royal Tenenbaums Virgin!]
Pussy Goes Grrr "Wes Anderson never wastes a frame." 
Movies Kick Ass "group hug"
Against the Hype [Welcome him back!]  
Encore Entertainment ...

Final 4 of "Hit Me" Season 3 (Join us!)
August 1st How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
August 8th Sherlock Jr (1924)... only 44 minutes long and available on Netflix Instant Watch. 
August 15th Singin in the Rain (1952) for Gene Kelly's centennial month!
August 22nd Dog Day Afternoon (SEASON 3 FINALE - 40 years ago this very day the events in the film take place)