WALL-E. Some film-making reflections.

By now you've either seen WALL-E or read something about the film (or WALL-E himself). Much has been made of the story-telling style of this unexpectedly remarkable film, so it might be worth swinging the flashlight around and attempting to illuminate another part of the picture.

It's facile to say that WALL-E is an homage to, say, Charlie Chaplin since no characters say much of anything until 40 minutes or so into the 98 minute movie. It's a bit more than a Chaplin homage, I'd venture: Motion Pictures as a form had no synchronous dialogue to speak of from the inception of movies in 1894 until 1928 or so. Deprived of "spoken" dialogue, thousands and thousands of films found a way to tell stories through body language, motion, facial expressions, editing, intertitles and the Stanton and Reardon screenplay is absolutely in the classic tradition of the so-called silent era. You have to watch the movie to tell what's happening. This is not illustrated radio (in the way that most modern television shows are which enable you to know what's happening even if you're in the other room cooking dinner and can't see the TV set). This is true "visual" story-telling.

What's stunning about this simple and quietly touching little fable (if one can stretch the definition of "fable" to include robots along with anthropomorphic animals) is the economy and richness of the script. There's hardly any wasted motion here, no fat in the meat, as it were. A second viewing reveals how wonderfully a detail pays off at the end. For example, each and every one of the "mad" robots released by the blast from EVE's disconnected arm plays a specific (and comic) part in the final chase scene. Rich in forwshadowing, the storyline shades in character, emotion, motivation all through tiny details: WALL-E's collection of his favorite garbage, the spare parts library, a tilt of his eyepods or twist of a mechanical wrist, and ultimately the precious videotape of Hello Dolly.

WALL-E himself is something of a simpleton, as one might expect from a robot intended to compress garbage, yet it's that incremental step up from "mechanical device" to "lonely being" that slides unnoticed past our critical inclinations that makes this whole thing work. The "acting" of what is literally a box-shaped garbage scoop on tank treads is amazing. Reduced to minimal cues to emotion, the animators have been forced to express character through the simplest forms of mime. Marcel Marceau would have been proud of them.

Nothing more than "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again" in schematic construction, the plot is woven intricately with the sort of science fiction detail that has -- until now -- been nearly impossible to create on the motion picture screen. I found myself thinking that the late Robert Sheckley, a seminal writer of speculative fiction in the 1940s and 50s would have loved this film. His stories were, twice, made into films (Freejack and The 10th Victim), but without the richness of modern CG graphics. One evening, about a year ago, I found myself watching an aerial shot of dozens of sailing ships gliding an 18th Century Harbor in Pirates of the Caribbean and realizing in that moment that virtually anything we can think of can now be shown on the huge motion picture screen in dazzling detail (soon to be followed by the same thing in stunning stereoscopic 3D). Now, here's WALL-E, the quintessential 1940's science fiction story fully realized in awesome reality 30 or 40 feet high in full color. [It breaks my heart that Ray Bradbury and I will never have the chance to bring The Martian Chronicles to the screen (as it should have been long ago) using this technology to re-create the retro-science fiction vision of the book. But that's a topic for another time.]

Few modern films have the simple, direct originality of WALL-E's screenplay. It has become de-rigeur to overload films with sizzle and flash and to leave the meat in the refrigerator. Young directors and editors, intoxicated with AVID and other non-linear editing systems, overdose with two-frame jump cuts simply because it's so easy to do so, and ignore the needs of telling a good story clearly. Not so here. This film plays out with effortless clarity. This has inexpicably become a nearly lost art. Somehow Hollywood has allowed its current product to become synonymous with "expensive computer graphics." Even the wonderful Star Wars series has gotten a bit too cozy with the aesthetics of computer games instead of the stories of DeMaupassant and perhaps this has led American filmmaking closer and closer to the slippery slope of entertainment based solely upon spectacle.

This, like the movie, is an essay theme worth re-visiting. Fine pieces of jewelry invite the owner to pick them up, turn them in the light, and discover new beauty over and over again.

In the end, WALL-E transcends its own technique and its very origins in digital bits and fractal equations. It's a softly whispered tale of loneliness, dreams, and loss. But most of all, it is a story of hope. Hope for the future, hope for mankind, hope for friendship and companionship, hope for the warm loving touch of a hard, cold mechanical hand.

And in the stunning climactic moment when the technological equivalent of fingers intertwine with passion and life, no words can express the fullness of the relationship between a square, clanking robot and a shining, white, flying egg with arms, and the promise that we, too, will survive our own pollution, technology and human follies with hearts -- filled like theirs -- with love.

KinDzaDza You-Tubed

KinDzaDza has been YouTubed.

This is not the ideal way to see this film. But it may be the only way at the moment.

KinDzaDza Part One

KinDzaDza - Lost Masterpiece

No one outside of the former Soviet Union has ever seen this. More's the pity. If you find a way to see the rest of it, let us all know.

Capitalism...its crazy! - Google Video

Major Dundee "Restored?"

(April 2005: Film Forum, New York City)

Major Dundee is still lost somewhere on the border between Texas and Mexico. A stunning endeavor to rescue him was mounted by Columbia Pictures recently, but despite fine work work and high-minded idealism, Sam Peckinpah's early film still verges upon the inaccessible and incomprehensible.
One thing is clear, Major Dundee may -- even in a mangled state -- be one of the finest attempts at portraying war in all it's dirt drenched, emotionally maladroit, morally untenable, politically muddled and ethically impossible reality. Where Kubrick's Paths of Glory pinpoints the damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma of the common soldier caught up in the ego-driven machinations of the highly placed perpetrators of World War I, what's left of Peckinpah's attempt to show something similar never quite focusses on enough tangibles to be either emotionally engaging or clearly provacative intellectually.

It is to the intellect, in fact, that this lengthened by 12 minutes version of Dundee seems to appeal the most. There are fine moments that start to take hold -- the Confederate soldier ordering a restrained, dignified black soldier to take off his boots -- but they never seem integrated into the sweep of the entire motion picture.

At this point in history, it becomes nearly impossible without major research and apologies to determine who or what's at fault. Sam Peckinpah's personal problems were well-known and as his drinking problems took hold, his grasp upon story and drama loosened. For my taste, his best films are Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch: here the story is clear and everything hangs in its proper place along the tales told.

But it's hard to even determine to what Major Dundee aspired. There are three credited writers. If this were a comedy, having 9 writers would be more appropriate, even de rigeur. But on a drama, more than one writer spells trouble, especially when the writer listed in third place is the director himself. The echoes of ringing lines from "Ride The High Country" ("get the ball rolling" or Warren Oates refusing to bathe) attest to some desperation or lethargy in scripting.

The climax, however, has an unexpected emotional punch: not the battle itself, but rather the abrupt, inconclusive ending itelf. Having barely survived a vague sort of victory over the French, the tattered remains of Dundee's troops simply ride up a hill into Texas. There're no medals, no triumphant music, no romantic closeups of those "brave" few lucky enough to get away with their asses still attached. There's only a straight cut to the end title cast list. That's it. Chilling in the right sort of way, and a confirmation of an intention to show war in a dispassionate, raw way.

Brecht espoused a kind of intellectual distance between his plays and the audience. The "verfremdung" effect, he called it, the "alienation" effect. One was supposed to attend the theater, smoke, eat, chat, ponder while the play was going on. The better to absorb the political ideas that Brecht wanted you to learn.

It's hard to believe that Peckinpah set out to accomplish just that, but too much of the movie exists in the mind trying to fill in the missing parts: who was Dundee? what did he want? what was really going on inside of him? who were all these people anyway. Yes, they are all outcasts, misfits, criminals, but only the horse thief seemed to have any personality beyond stereotype.

Nonetheless, it's hard to not admire the attempt. At any time in Hollywood history, a production that has the balls to try something a little different is the clear exception to the rules. Even Heaven's Gate which is much more of a disaster than Major Dundee and undoubtedly has less at its heart and soul than Dundee does even in this purportedly restored, but still mangled version, needs to be given some credit for "chutzpah." But the proof of the pudding is that -- even at full length -- Heaven's Gate doesn't work and attests to spending money on sizzle (authentic 19th Century roller skates that no one in the audience can even see) instead of steak. Dundee has more meat on its bones, but the bones appear -- from the evidence at hand -- to be a bit rickety.

Ryan's Daughter

David Lean can hardly be accused of pandering. He wrote once in a late 1940's essay that it went without saying that an important purpose of the cinema was to give a momentary dream to young people on Saturday night dates: for "her" that she was beautiful, exquisitely dressed and adored, for "him," that he was handsome and had conquered."her." And so they wrapped arms about one another and drifted away for two hours. There was no cynicism in it, however, or Brief Encounter certainly would not exist. And, of course, there is Dr. Zhivago, kind of an ultimate Saturday Night hug movie. And Ryan's Daughter.

Through the good graces of a good friend, I got to see a screening of a (relatively) uncut 35mm Anamorphic print of Ryan's Daughter just a few days ago.Before you put this down for fear of some ravings about techie things, I'll come back to it later. Romantic as it is, this film never sweeps you away like Zhivago. Instead, it has a kind of raw tragedy and raw sexuality that is both uncharacteristic of Lean and in many ways ahead of its time for mainstream movies.

So then, what's wrong with this picture. To begin with, it was filmed in 70mm. My recollection of seeing it at the Granada Theatre in Buffalo, NY in its uncut roadshow version projected through the original hand-ground Todd-AO prototype projection lenses, is of a truly stunning and glowing motion picture.

But to every one of my four companions in an almost deserted theatre during opening weekend, it was boring beyond belief. My girlfriend at the time was so bored, she wanted to leave and we had a terrible fight about it afterwards. I was, on the other hand, fascinated by it, and the glow of the film is almost unshakeable in my memories.

That is the first thing that is missing from a 35mm print: the incredible visual detail and the stunning play of light from a 65mm negative projected with the proper lenses on a slightly curved silvered screen from a 70mm release print. Every color is crisp. Every grain of sand is visible. Every mote of dust in every glory of sunshine. Wow.

The second thing is the sound. 70mm mag stripe had seven channel stereo (or perhaps it was six channel stereo, who's counting.) Five channels behind the screen so that the dialogue would move across the vast image with each character as they spoke. Then one (or was it two?) surround channels for scenes with huge waves crashing against the beach. Long since abandoned for the modern super surround systems where all dialogue is mixed to the center channel and the three front channels are basically used to have the sound of a car move from right to left and the surrounds for helicopters flying all over the place (pretty kewl actually), the original stereophonic systems were very focussed on human speech: where it was and who was saying it. Sometimes this got disconcerting when cutting between over the shoulder shots and having dialogue pop back and forth from right to left. That's why it was abandoned.

But in its glory, you couldn't beat it for dramatic scenes!

It's a pity, then, that this recent screening was of a 35mm print (and with no stereophonic sound either) because one of the big losses was of visual sensuality. It is like a different movie then, making you focus on the characters and dialogue and less on the image. A companion remarked that he had rediscovered the film on television, and I realized that it would probably work very well there with its big close ups and medium shot conversations.

That, in fact, is what is so uncharacteristic about Ryan, and why, I think, it don't all hang together. Compared to Brief Encounter or to Odd Man Out or The Rising of the Moon there is virtually no intimacy in the film, and the only characters who are shown in intimate settings are Sara Miles and Robert Mitchum. Nothing is ever revealed about the private lives of anyone else! And it is all played out against the most gorgeous landscapes ever revealed on the screen!

It is a thin story on a huge, huge, huge, huge set. Trevor Howard's is virtually the only character written with both the size and the subtlety to match the huge rocks, crashing waves, and desolate countryside. Setting a romatic tragedy against emptiness cries out for some internal life in the characters. And stunning art direction won't fill that hole.

Imagine that Rose was brilliant as well as beautiful and think what a tragedy that would have been. Instead, we have a woman craving, unknowingly, for a good fuck, for the big "O." Albeit that a woman's sexual life was ignored and to some extent consciously repressed those many years ago, that the story takes place in Ireland (home of the Irish Sex Manual -- filled with 200 blank pages) amongst Irish Catholics, it strikes me that it is not tragic enough that she simply be deprived of physical fulfillment. There is not enough history to the characters to make this compelling: who was Rose's mother really? where did her Dad come from? is it enough only to know that the British won't let the young people work and that all they have to do is to hang out on the main street and look at each other lustfully and make fun of the town fool? It seems to me that these are characters that are conceived of as monolithically and simplistically as the rocks on the seashore.

But, Lean and Bolt manage to pull this out of the fire somehow. Having seen this film now around 4 or 5 times in various incarnations and butcherings, I've never fallen asleep, nor have I ever felt like I was wasting my time. This is not damning with faint praise. Even Lean is entitled to come a cropper. And bad Lean is pretty good. Nonetheless, I think that the only way to appreciate what they meant to do is in the original 70mm format with sound intact. Then all the pieces are in place. It's all very well and good to see the strengths of the story as they reveal themselves (at proper scale) in the P&S TV version, but Lean set out to tell a mythic story with mythic sized characters on a now mythical sized screen with technical systems that seem sadly to be lost in time. Let's bring it all back in IMAX with all its visual and aural beauty and all of its dramatic blemishes.

New York City, December 20, 1996

Theatre Epilogue Epilogue

It's only a week later, but as I walked home from the final Freeman Dyson lecture, The Amsterdam Theatre had changed again. Each letter of the name A M S T E R D A M was finished. They blinked on in turn, first A, then M until the whole name was spelled out. There are little frills of lights around the letters that blink, too. Beneath the marquee, little yellow bulbs run in a loop that disappears into the infinity of a correctly placed mirror inside the still unfinished lobby, each flickering yellow glow chasing the next around and around and around.

What new restoration wonder will come next?

Wednesday, March 5, 1997, New York City

Movie Comments

I don't write movie reviews. And I keep telling that to all the magazine editors who keep asking me to do it, and I keep telling that to all the publicists who invite me to screenings so that I can write nice reviews of their movies for them. I do, sometimes, write articles about movies. It will be an interview, or a recollection, or some other damn nonsense that occurs to me at the moment. Life, however, is much too short to spend more time on a bad movie (I guess there are some) beyond viewing it in the first place. So I only write about movies that interest me. Notice that I didn't say "movies I like." Movies that interest me

1/18/97