Tag: Roger Deakins

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1917

The year 2019 was a banner one for Memphis short films. One of the best — and certainly the most technically challenging to produce — was “A Night Out” by Kevin Brooks and Abby Myers. Winner of the Memphis Film Prize, “A Night Out” is done in one continuous, 10-minute shot by cinematographer Andrew Trent Fleming, who follows actress Rosalyn Ross up and down the stairs at Molly Fontaine’s. The hard part was to make it seamless while passing through different lighting conditions and requiring a dozen actors to hit their marks exactly right at the same time.

The origin of the seamless, one-shot trick is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope. Hitch took advantage of a then-new camera that held 10 minutes worth of film and staged his parlor murder mystery as a play on a soundstage. The cuts in the 74-minute film are concealed with camera moves and lighting tricks.

Ten years later, Orson Welles would take Hitch’s innovation and run with it. The unbroken, three-minute-and-twenty-second opening shot of Touch of Evil sets up the entire plot and introduces the main characters with spectacular swoops and daring close-ups.

The modern vogue for long takes began with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, which features a climactic battle sequence that takes six minutes to unfold as Clive Owen runs through an urban hellscape. Since then, bravado long takes have popped up in everything from Gaspar Noé’s trashy psychedelic dance picture Climax to Cuarón’s sentimental prestige picture Roma. But these films use long takes as a seasoning. The last film to attempt the full Rope trick was Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark. 

Enter director Sam Mendes (who most recently directed two James Bond movies) and his war film 1917. The story is based on the experience of his grandfather Alfred Mendes on the Western Front during World War I. It opens with a pair of English soldiers napping on a beautiful April morning near the Belgian-French border. Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) have no idea what kind of day they’re about to have when their commanding officer picks them for a mission.

After fighting over the same few acres of ground for more than a year, the Germans have unexpectedly withdrawn to a new position. An English battalion, which happens to include Blake’s brother, is set to launch an all-out attack to capitalize on this unexpected development. But Allied high command has discovered that they’re charging into a trap. Since the Germans cut the telephone lines on their way out, Blake and Schofield must carry word to Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch), telling him to call off the attack. The pair of buddies sets out to cross nine miles of battlefield to deliver the message that could save 1,000 lives.

Mendes’ best move in 1917 was tapping Roger Deakins, our greatest living cinematographer, to shoot this intimate story of individual heroism set against the backdrop of an epic conflict. With digital imaging technology, lightweight cameras, cranes and dollies with fully programmable computer controls, and CGI to paint over the gaps, Deakins’ task is superficially easier than Hitchcock’s. But there’s really no comparison. Rope was a bottle show, while 1917 takes place outdoors, ranging up and down trenches stuffed with soldiers, through bunkers rocked by shelling and craters filled with corpses.

Not so quiet on the Western Front — George MacKay (above) risks life and limb in 1917.

The best sequence in a film made of nothing but impossible images comes after night falls on the worst day of our protagonists’ lives. Schofield sneaks through a bombed-out French town, his progress lit by flashing explosions, shimmering flares, and a raging bonfire. Deakins uses the flickering shadows like a German Expressionist, creating ephemeral representations of our hero’s haunted mental state.

The other great film from the 1950s that pioneered the long take is Paths of Glory. If 1917 has a direct inspiration, it’s Stanley Kubrick’s searing 1957 World War I film. Both Kirk Douglas’ one-shot tour of the trenches and his march across No Man’s Land are directly referenced by Mendes to great effect. But the visual callbacks to a legendary anti-war film raise issues that 1917 skirts. Not that Mendes shrinks from putting the horrors of war in your face — far from it. But Kubrick is explicit that war is empty vanity. Mendes is focused on the technical trickery, pacing his film like a first-person shooter to keep you engaged in the action. It wouldn’t do to lose your attention while Blake and Schofield trudge through a field with no one to shoot at them. Maybe Truffaut was right when he said “Every film about war ends up being pro-war” — especially one like 1917 that looks so damn good.

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Blade Runner 2049

“I can’t help thinking it’s a lot like making a sequel to Casablanca,” tweeted author William Gibson while on his way to see Blade Runner 2049. Gibson has the distinction of being one of the first in a long line of creators influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He was about a third of the way through his first draft of Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberpunk and indelibly shaped our conception of the internet age, when he saw the film. Neuromancer and its sequels are set in a decaying urban world that looks a lot like the hellscape Scott created for Blade Runner.

Casablanca has been described as having a screenplay made entirely of cliches — but the reason they’re cliches is because subsequent screenwriters stole them from Casablanca. Something like that happened with Blade Runner visually. “It affected the way people dressed,” Gibson said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.”

Blade Runner was released in the summer of 1982, sci-fi’s cinema’s miracle year, in the company of classics like Poltergeist, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal. But Scott’s groundbreaking visual masterpiece had the misfortune to be released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America, and audiences wanted a feel-good story about a brave, healing alien more than a glimpse into the dystopian future. Even having Harrison Ford as the lead couldn’t put asses in seats, and Blade Runner flopped hard, almost destroying Scott’s career.

But the legend grew over the decades, and so Scott, acting as executive producer, tapped Arrival director Denis Villeneuve to helm the long-awaited (or perhaps long-dreaded) sequel, with screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who had adapted Philip K. Dick for the original film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who worked with Villeneuve on Sicario, was chosen to follow up one of the most visually influential films in history.

Blade Runner‘s opening shot identifies the setting as “Los Angles, 2019.” Blade Runner 2049 begins with an echo of those images: An eye, in extreme close up, and a flying car gliding over the ruins of California. In the ensuing three decades, the ecological crisis has only deepened. The only way to grow food is in vast, climate-controlled greenhouses. When the car lands in one lonely agricultural outpost, K (Ryan Gosling) emerges. Like Rick Deckard, he works for the LAPD hunting down artificial humans or replicants, who have gone rogue. Unlike Deckard, he is unambiguously a replicant himself. At the farm, he finds Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an android on the run who berates him for killing “his own kind.” He wouldn’t do that, Sapper says, if he had “seen the miracle.” K kills him anyway, but the words ring in his ears. What miracle?

Those fearing a cookie cutter remake of the original will be pleased to discover that this is not the case. Blade Runner 2049‘s story builds logically on the original — a seemingly impossible task pulled off gracefully by Fancher and co-writer Michael Green. Resonances come not out of slavish fan service, but because both films are essentially noir detective stories. Some elements feel more like a sequel to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Scott’s film, such as K’s relationship with his holographic A.I. Joi (Ana de Armas)—two simulated beings experiencing possibly real emotions. Gosling gives by far the best performance of his career. When his investigation leads him to an aged Deckard living in the irradiated remains of Las Vegas, he goes toe to toe with Ford and a malfunctioning Elvis hologram in a bravado sequence that alone is worth the price of admission.

The only element of 2049 significantly inferior to the original film is the music. Vangelis’ improvisational synth score is as big a part of the Blade Runner mystique as John Williams’ soundtrack is for Star Wars. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch created a conventional, pounding, atonal soundscape that feels much less subtle.

The film’s running time is hefty, but its pleasures are deep and satisfying. Villeneuve’s direction is brilliant, and if Deakins doesn’t win an Oscar for this cinematography, the award has no meaning. See it on the largest screen you can find.

Blade Runner 2049
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Hail, Caesar!

Fewer Communists, more Clooney.

That’s a film critique I never thought I would offer, but here we are. Like all right-thinking Urban Achievers, I am a Coen Brothers fan—a fanatic, even. Who else has been able to create great films in so many different genres? They’ve produced two great film noirs in Miller’s Crossing and The Man Who Wasn’t There, expanded the crime genre with Fargo and the Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men, added to the Western legacy with True Grit, and crafted some of the greatest comedies in film history with Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Basically, if Joel and Ethan Coen make a movie, I’m there, no questions asked, because there’s always going to be something great onscreen. This is true even in the case of misfires like Hail, Caesar!

The strengths of their comedies have always been rooted in crackling wordplay, characterizations which walk the line between the wacky and sympathetic, and a burgeoning sense of the absurdity of life. The premise of Hail, Caesar!, an eventful day in the life of an Eisenhower-era Hollywood fixer named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) seems like perfect fodder for the brothers. If you’re looking for absurdity, Hollywood presents a target-rich environment. Capitol Pictures, Mannix’s fictional studio, is a circus of stars like DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a squeaky-clean protagonist of water ballet pictures whose image is put at risk when she gets pregnant; Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the singing cowboy whose almost superhuman roping and wrangling skills are of no use when the studio thrusts him into the role of a big city swell in Laurence Laurentz’s (Ralph Feinnes) latest chamber drama; and Frances McDormand as accident-prone film editor. Best of all is George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, the epically vain actor whose kidnapping from the set of his newest sword-and-sandals flick by a group of communist screenwriters who collectively call themselves The Future provides Hail, Caesar!‘s plot momentum. Clooney, rocking the praetorian haircut like it’s 1998 on the set of ER, is loaded for bear, ready to go O Brother, Where Art Thou? big. And that’s what we all want, right? Critics like me have to pay lip service to subtle naturalism, but there’s nothing like seeing a really great actor vaulting over the top, grabbing scenery to chew. But Clooney’s efforts are largely wasted as he ends up imprisoned by the communists for much of the film while the Coens try to wring humor out of mid-century Marxist rhetoric. The basic joke is sound—the commies claim to have scientifically cracked the code of history, and yet they were unable to predict defeat by the capitalists—but the scenes meander endlessly. Clooney’s manic energy should have been at the heart of the picture, but he’s just the MacGuffin.

Let the kidnapped Clooney chew the scenery.

The Coens are operating in Lebowski mode, so the kidnapping plot is just a contrivance on which to hang the comic digressions and character moments that are the film’s real meat. The Hollywood setting allows them to try on different genres every few minutes, such as Channing Tatum’s gay sailor musical number “No Dames,” but too often it comes off as empty riffing. The Coen’s clockwork timing seems broken.

I personally enjoyed Hail Caesar!, but I cannot recommend it to anyone outside the Coen cult. It is their least funny film since The Ladykillers in 2004, but, to be fair, the last decade has seen the brothers occupied with existential dramas like 2009’s A Serious Man. Roger Deakins’ photography is, of course, first rate, and the production design is off the charts good. In a way, Hail, Cesar! reminds me of a mid-period Woody Allen picture, expertly crafted but lacking a certain energy. And consider this: When The Big Lebowski was released in 1998, it was considered a disappointment after the universally hailed Fargo, but time was good to the Dude, and it is now rightly ranked as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Considering the majesty of the Coen’s True Grit remake and the crackerjack work they did on the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, maybe the days of the gonzo Coen comedy are over, and the brothers should stay serious.

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The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

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The Man Who Shot Brad Pitt

When Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) first appears onscreen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he looks the part of the cold-blooded killer. With his stovepipe hat, silent-film villain’s whey-faced complexion, and seamlessly mortared, predatory row of top teeth, Ford evokes the angel of death so strongly that you half-expect the film to end before anyone has finished a plate of beans or saddled a horse. But soon it’s apparent that Ford would have trouble killing a fly; he’s actually the meek, overenthusiastic specter of celebrity worship — just a drooling, dream-addled fan of the outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) who has come not to bury the gunslinger but to join him in one last midnight ride.

Eventually, Ford joins the James gang, and after following James around much of Missouri, he ultimately fulfills the duty implicit in the film’s title. To his credit, though, writer/director Andrew Dominik takes his slow, sweet time getting there, and that’s one of his film’s many triumphs. The Assassination of Jesse James is both a meditative, haunting Western and a smashing example of inspired genre work.

Dominik’s wordy screenplay, which achieves a kind of mock-Cormac McCarthy eloquence, enhances the humdrum story’s pulpy, mythical qualities. Dick Liddle (a superb Paul Schneider), one of James’ hoodlums, avers that “You can hide things in vocabulary,” and unusual words such as “vouchsafe,” “palaver,” “auguries,” and “personage” tumble from Hugh Ross’ narration. This imaginative diction spills over into the characters too. When Liddle is shot in the leg, he describes his wound to Ford as “full of torment, Bob. Thanks for askin’.”

This ornate vocabulary does indeed hide the basic emotion that unifies all these characters: fear. Worn to the stumps by bad weather and paranoia, these men feel exposed everywhere. As Pitt plays him, Jesse James is little different from his bumbling cohorts. He’s scared and hunted. However, he’s a much more experienced and merciless killer and that is a significant asset.

Jesse James‘ photography is also a significant asset for the film. Camera man Roger Deakins, who shot several of the Coen Brothers’ films, achieves some magnificent pictorial effects by shooting many scenes with the most meager light sources — lanterns, candles, sunlight, stars, reflected snow. In one ironic lighting decision, a single outhouse candle dwindles to blackness as Liddle prepares to dip his wick in a willing adulteress (Kailin See).

The last 20 minutes of the film explore the much larger irony of Ford’s own fate after he shoots James in the back (an act played out in the film like a staged ritual even when it happens the first time.) As the years go by, Jesse James, bandit and murderer, is fondly recalled as an American hero, while Ford grows more reclusive and insecure as his hate mail piles up. Ford’s cruel destiny is thus to live out a genre axiom. The success of the film is the failure of Ford’s own life: the how is much more important than the what.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Opening Friday, October 26th

Multiple locations