Beauty and the Beast

When Cocteau finished "Beauty and the Beast" in 1946 I don't know whether he had seen "The Wizard of Oz" made six years earlier in 1939. There was a war on. I can't get over how little he had to go on with "Beast": it was essentially a picture book, a text and some black and white drawings. I have to get those drawings...but it seems like a huge amount of the imagery is Cocteau's: the look of the beast with the big head, high collar and fangs and the animated mansion with those arms sticking out of the walls. Whereas "The Wizard of Oz" started as a picture book, then was turned into a play before the movie was made, so it was the music and a lot of the dialogue that was original. The imagery had been established: I remember a photo of a tinman costume from the 30's, and the whole thing is already there, including the funnel on the head. But "Beast" is almost completely from Cocteau's imagination.... I have to get those drawings.

And, intentionally or not, for a "monster in a haunted house" movie, it's un-German or un-Gothic. (There's only one 4 second Gothic touch: when the father comes to the door, his shadow grows in size, even though he's standing still; it's a trick he stole from Murnau. But that's it.) When I first saw the movie 35 years ago, I was most impressed with how many scenes are filmed outside, in bright sunshine. It's really the exact opposite of "Alien."



It's amazing to think that they gave Cocteau all that money and the resources to make a major motion picture when he had only made a few arty films ("Blood of a Poet" - sure, I liked it, but it's not exactly "Gone with the Wind") and really he had only his reputation as a poet, painter and a gay public intellectual. He had a huge ego, and he also had that old-school notion - almost completely gone now - that if you had a really good education in the Classics: the art, philosophy, and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, then you could do anything, from making a great work of art to running a country.

Academy Awards 2010 - some final thoughts

I'd always wanted to see those short films that get Academy Award nominations, so I rented a DVD of the nominated shorts for 2007, live action and animated.

And I found out that the shorts that make the cut are a microcosm of the rest of the Academy Award process: the strange and exciting films are long gone and we're left with films that are well-meaning and earnest. Even the comedy was earnest. And unremarkable.

But it was the animated films that were a revelation: every one was stop-motion animation with computer assistance, in other words, puppets with computers.

So things have changed: we all grew up with cartoons that were based on drawings. I remember someone saying in film school: "I'm not signing up for Animation because I can't draw."

So instead of cartoons originating with ink on paper, now we have the work of hi-tech puppeteers. There was a cartoon clown in the 30's that climbed back into the ink bottle at the end of each episode...I'm thinking of those surreal black and white cartoons (I think "Betty Boop" is the only one commonly known today). Puppetry is not a bad thing, because puppeteers are mainly interested in creating a character and telling a story in a theatrical way, so it's a good match to the movies. But, let's face it, a puppeteer is used to being ruled by theatrical conventions, so I'm not surprised that the results, with or without computers, are conventional. As opposed to a wild guy with a pen and a blank piece of paper (or clear plastic) where anything goes.



We saw "God of Carnage" last night. With Lucy Liu ("Kill Bill") and Jeff Daniels ("Dumb and Dumber" and "Something Wild"). It was written by someone who knows what theatre is all about: talking. This was all talking and almost no spectacle (I hate that "Miss Saigon" helicopter stuff.) Great opening: the curtain rises to a pitch black stage, the lights come on and the four characters are already there, so there's none of that "enter stage right" business. Sal saw it with James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") and I'm sure he was great, but Jeff Daniels was great too.
Reminder: "Something Wild" (1986) by Jonathan Demme was a very well-made comedy with a climax that takes place on Long Island...very good.

The Hurt Locker

The Academy wanted to give the Best Director Award to a woman and so here comes this movie directed by James Cameron's ex-wife made in the same year he's in contention too and they definitely don't want to see him up there with another "Top of the world!" moment and it's a Serious Movie about a Serious Subject (it's not "Point Break") and that's it, award goes to...



You don't have to be a veteran of anything to be able to criticize all the bone-headed activities of these three Americans running around Iraq. From what I understand, only the location scout deserves praise here, because it appears that Jordan, where the exteriors were shot, does resemble Iraq.



I'll leave the big stuff (characterisation, plot, common sense) to others. I want to focus on something small: technique. After the first scene with the broken robot (I did like the robot video POV), we're back at the "barracks" (or whatever it's called nowadays) where the soldiers sleep, the soldiers engage in conversation and the camera is still hand-held and we're still seeing jump cuts. Only five minutes into the movie and I'm already put off, because I want these techniques to "express" something, and here their use is just dishonest, a means to give the scene a cheap "tension" that's undeserved, and that the actors could have carried off on their own, thank you very much...

This forces me to wax nostalgic about "Breathless" (1960) where the jump cut and the hand held camera meant so much in a movie that was able to be anti-Hollywood (quirky plot structure and low-budget) and an homage to Hollywood (gangster movies and the star system) at the same time. In "Breathless" the technique was new and exciting (and, yes, a little mystifying) but here we're looking at something straining to be authentic in a pseudo-documentary sort of way.

So don't watch the Academy Awards for the awards. Watch it for the dresses or the jokes or something else important. I watch it for those old-movie montages: I love to try to identify every damn one-second clip, and I get upset with myself when I can't...