NYFF: Cinephiliacs Slices A Piece of "Life of Pi"

On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Jaime Christley comes on board to discuss a tigers, alligators, and minotaurs, as we dive into more from the New York Film Festival. This episode includes discussions on Life of Pi, Room 237, Tabu, Night Across the Street, Leviathan, and Caesar Must Die. You can listen to that here. 

Interlude: A Dangerous Method - Flat Compositions in 3D Films

Correction: Danny Baldwin notes below that Men in Black 3 was actually shot on film, not with 3D cameras, but it was still designed with a 3D conversion in mind.

I don’t plan on writing a full review of Men in Black 3, the painfully dull sequel to the Will Smith franchise. The film is rarely inventive and quite laborious, and even the quite awesome Josh Brolin is only so fun as a young Tommy Lee Jones (who seems to have only shown up for a paycheck). The film’s saving grace is actually Michael Stuhlbarg as a being who can see across alternate timelines (useful for watching Mets games, it turns out).

            But besides the lazy script, there was something extremely alarming about Men in Black 3: the flat compositions. Being a hater of 3D in almost every possible situation (sans Pina), I ended up seeing the film in 2D (and in 35mm no less!). This is not the first time I’ve seen a 3D film in my preferred format, but it is the first time I’ve noted that choosing to see the film in 2D was actually a detriment to the film.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Tingles for Adventure, Drunkard and Canine in Tow

The Adventures of Tintin

Directed By: Steven Spielberg

Written By: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, based on the comics by Hergé

Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Toby Jones

Editor: Michael Kahn, Art Direction: Andrew Jones and Jeff Wisniewski, Original Music: John Williams

Rated: PG for comic book violence and fun.

            There’s one man you can’t keep your eyes off of in The Adventures of Tintin, and he’s not even on screen, and this time not even behind it. I’m of course referring to the film’s director, Hollywood wonder-boy Steven Spielberg. His presence looms large in this adaptation of the comic books by Hergé, who, while world-famous, remains mostly anonymous to American viewers, myself included. But its Mr. Spielberg’s camera—how he uses it and how he constantly reinvents the rules of modern cinema (many of which, he wrote)—that remains the constant thrill of Tintin. It’s also the downfall of his film.

            Mr. Spielberg is no stranger to adventures, and Indiana Jones seems to be in the town over from wherever globetrotting Tintin, a young and peppy journalist with an ache for adventure, must be. But here the craftsman takes on new challenges; not just the added dimension of 3D (something I really only noticed in the weight of my wallet), but going for full-scale animation. The Adventures of Tintin isn’t a classically animated world—Mr. Spielberg used the aide of Avatar director James Cameron, as well as producer Peter Jackson, to use the WETA studios and shoot the whole film in a digital landscape with actors carefully monitored to bring their performances to the cartoonish caricatures. But there’s something lifeless in Tintin, and its not just the odd uncanny valley look of the film’s characters, but its lack of a true adventure spirit, which instead feels calculated and often standard, that the reveals and boyhood adventure that has marked so much of Mr. Spielberg’s career remains absent.

Pina: Dance, Out of the Theater and Out of the Screen

Pina

Directed By: Wim Wenders

Featuring: Members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal

Director of Photography: Helene Louvart, Editor: Toni Froschhammer, Production Designer: Peter Pabst, Original Music: Thom Hanreich

Rated: PG for dancing, I assume.

            Now two years into the “three dimensional revolution,” the style has finally arrived in its most luscious and perfected use in Pina, a dance documentary from Wim Wenders, featuring the choreography of Pina Bausch. 3D became the next step in cinema after James Cameron’s Avatar, but since then, directors have struggled to find an art in creation space and depth, while studios have thrown it on top of films without any care for what use of 3D should be. Even skillful directors like Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), Martin Scorsese (Hugo), and Steven Spielberg (The Adventures of Tintin) haven’t particularly cracked the 3D bubble in a way that occasionally wows but often remains flat. What exactly are we supposed to do with all this space?

            But Mr. Wenders, who has made a name both as a director of narratives (Wings of Desire) and concert documentaries (The Buena Vista Social Club), understands why 3D should be used: complete spectacle. The same could be said for the choreography of the late Ms. Bausch, whose choreography defies most structures of what we understand as dance—breaking our understanding of tradition for something new and inventive. And thus, the marriage of the two artists—Ms. Bauch as the creator and Mr. Wenders as the capturer—makes for pure magic in this total extravaganza.

Hugo: The Past, Present and Future of Cinema, All Collided Into One

Hugo

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

Written By: John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Mortez, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jude Law

Director of Photographer: Robert Richardson, Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker, Production Designer: Dante Ferretti, Original Music: Howard Shore

Rated: PG           

            In 1989, film history Tom Gunning wrote a highly influential essay entitled “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Mr. Gunning examined how film historians had written about the early yore of silent cinema and its push toward narrative cinema. But he proposed that the attraction of the works of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers was not based on seeing stories, but seeing things move. The cinema itself, the spectacle of movement, was its primary attraction. Stories came later; cinema was born out of this attraction of the possibilities of cinema could show or do anything we could think up.

            It is this love of spectacle that has obviously drawn Martin Scorsese to make one of his most ambitious, pictures of his career and one of his most self-conscious films. Hugo, an adaptation of a young adult novel by Brian Selznick looks like a strange departure for a director as it follows a story of a child in somewhat of a fairy tale. But Hugo is much more than that, a bold, genre-crossing picture that is both narrative and spectacle, and ultimately a film essay on the importance of the origins of cinema, and the need to preserve classic film as well.