Departures is a Japanese film that just opened downtown and demands your attention but not for the obvious reasons. Departures was one of the nominees at the Oscars earlier this year and won in the category of best foreign film. Departures traffics in human comedy. A so so cello player finds he can't even afford his new string bass when the ad hoc symphony he plays for disbands. (In the movie dialogue they refer to the bass costing like 3-million yen, which is somewhere around $30,000 American.) His supportive wife agrees to move from the big city back to his home community and he gets a job to help out. Only when he applies as a travel clerk he realizes that the newspaper ad has a typo and thus the departures actually refers to a cottage industry of people who clean dead bodies. Kind of the middle man between the undertaker and the actual burial. There was a film earlier this year called Sunshine Cleaning that dealt with sisters who start a dead body fluid cleanup service when they find out how profitable it can be. Only in this Japanese film the people who surround the protagonist (Masahiro Motoki as Daigo Kobayashi) - his wife and his friends - are aghast at what he's doing for a living. Bottom line, in our culture this would be a well paying job performing a holistic service. In Japan death holds a taboo meaning and the stigma of Daigo's labor makes for plot points. Our hero learns the pride inherent to his work, plays cello on a levee surrounded by mountains, watches a gaggle of geese frolicking in the pasture and in general grows as a human being. The direction observes verisimilitude while allowing for comic turns. The compelling ending brings the characters back together in a more serious mode, everyone more mature from their experiences.
This weekend the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston runs a double bill of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, along with Jean-Luc Godard's Made in the U.S.A. Showtimes are listed on the MFA film website.
Later in the month, the Angelika Film Center will screen the first four Harry Potter films in advance of the latest installment opening July 15.
Duncan Jones discovered a twist on the traditional film screening and subsequent Q&A. Instead of the director taking questions from the audience he’s asking said audience the questions. “Which side of the moon is best for Helium 3 mining?” Jones was in Houston last March presenting his movie Moon to a doctrine of NASA scientists. After a string of film festival (Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW) screenings Moon gets a limited mid-summer release from Sony Pictures Classics. “It’s not a PR stunt. NASA asked to see the film,” Jones grins. “Online one of the NASA employees asked ‘Why is it set on the far side of the moon, don’t they realize there are higher deposits of Helium 3 on the near side?’” Moon stars Sam Rockwell as astronaut Sam Bell, working on a three-year solo mission for a mining company on the moon. A whirlwind opening infomercial informs the audience that Helium 3 has replaced traditional fuels and is green as well as profitable. This sequence depicts harvesting the energy substance on the Moon and delivery systems that bring it to Earth. “Helium 3 is a potential fuel for something called fusion power. It’s an energy source that could replace fossil fuel,” Jones tells Free Press Houston in an exclusive interview. “The problem with fusion is most of the fuels leave radioactive waste. Helium 3 burns clean but doesn’t exist in any great supply on Earth. On the Apollo mission when they brought back lunar rock samples they found concentrations of Helium 3.” As Bell nears the end of his work contract he experiences profound fatigue. At one point Bell discovers that someone else is with him on the lone mining base. It’s a new version of himself come to replace his old self. “The film was initially darker until Sam put his stamp on the role during some improvs. One of those was the “Walking on Sunshine” scene,” says Jones of a part of the film where the two Sams act out their aggressions arguing about the volume of the song by Katrina and the Waves playing on a portable device. Jones modeled some of the shots after Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, which featured Jeremy Irons acting opposite himself. Explains Jones: “We used a mechanical dolly that will replicate the same move twice, at the same speed and on the same plane. If you have a static object like the set, when the camera makes that move the second time the images overlap without ghosting but anything that is moving you can shoot in multiple versions. “There was a lot of films we paid homage to,” adds Jones. “Silent Running being one of them, Outland, the original Alien. There were a few films that we that we consciously watched and thought about trying to isolate what it was we loved so much.” Throw in some fiction by Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and 2000 A.D. the comic book from the UK. “2000 A.D. had these 1 and 2 page stories called Future Shocks,” recalls Jones. “The science fiction today looks made by people who seem to be embarrassed about science fiction. You’re only supposed to like it if you watch the effects or are being wowed by the aliens themselves. The intellectual curiosity that you get from literature is something that doesn’t come across in films anymore.” Bell’s work is aided by a computer, Gertie (voiced by Kevin Spacey). The monitor displays a smiley face as a kind of screen logo. “It’s an iconic image. I used the smiley face because I thought it was a nice illusion to the 70s era Smiley Face as well as icons that people use when they’re texting. “I always worry that people are not going to take what I say in the right spirit, so I always add a wink face or use a smiley face at the end of the message. So, I thought if you’re building a machine to interact with a cranky blue-collar worker you want to keep his spirits up,” comments Jones. In the recent Watchman movie the registered Smiley Face is used and royalties were no doubt paid. Jones grins in response to the copyright comment. “We did have to look into rights clearance. If you use the official Smiley Face with the black oval eyes, there’s a specific style of Smiley Face you pay for. What we created was a variation of texting icons, a colon here a bracket there. Gertie obviously references HAL from 2001. But I also wanted to set up expectations and then twist them,” Jones remarks about the computer. “There’s a philosophy that says if you believe a machine to be sentient you should treat it with the same moral value as another human. For the interiors Jones shot in a Super 240 aspect ratio. The dimensions of the mining bases main corridor are 2.4 times wider than they are high. “When we’re shooting right down the middle of the hall it should be the same shape as the projection itself,” says Jones. “There’s a book of photography from the Apollo moon missions called Full Moon by Michael Light. That was our visual reference for moon exteriors. Various astronauts while on the moon took all the photos, and it’s black and white until you see a sparkle of gold from one of the pieces of equipment. “Our exteriors were done with model miniatures, again trying to reference the science fiction films I mentioned earlier. Cameron’s Aliens has some amazing miniatures work. What we’re able to do is use modern post-production techniques on top of model miniatures. I personally built a huge piece of lunar landscape. Shoveling sand and covering it with Fuller’s earth. The lunar rovers are being pulled across the ground with fishing line. That gave us a textured believable look. “We had a company, Cinesite in the UK, digitally extend the lunar landscape and enhance the models. The star field was digital. Technically the stars don’t show up in photographs. But when we tried the scene with a black sky it looks wrong,” explains Jones, who adds. “There’s so much reflectivity off the surface of the moon from the direct sunlight that it obscures the stars. The level of brightness is known as the albedo by scientists. Since the film features Sam Rockwell in almost every scene you don’t realize the number of ways different actors pop up. In video transmission from the home planet Bell talks to colleagues and his daughter. “Kaya Scodelario who plays Eve Bell is in a very popular television show called Skins in the UK; then there’s Matt Berry, who’s a successful comedian and on a show called The IT Crowd; and Benedict Wong a terrific actor and a buddy, he’s was in Sunshine.” Jones himself makes a vocal cameo appearance as a radio commentator heard in the airwaves during the closing sequence. Moon opens on July 3 at the Angelika Film Center.
Right off the bat Public Enemies starts swinging for the outfield. The film by Michael Mann charts the last year or two of 1930s criminal John Dillinger as played menacingly by Johnny Depp. The look of the film, shot in HD, leans to a video look rather than a film look. Several recognizable actors are unrecognizable in brief but impressive parts. A theme emerges after viewing that relates to the meaning of words. Alternating between robberies by Dillinger and his gang we follow the exploits of Melvin Purvis (Christain Bale). First Dillinger busts some buddies out of prison, then Purvis guns down Pretty Boy Floyd, then Dillinger robs a bank, then the Senate rebukes a young head of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, during a funding hearing. Purivs is appointed head of a special Chicago based team of agents who hunt down the new #1 criminal. The plot cleverly jolts back and forth between the official investigation (the moniker FBI came later) and gangster intrigue. For instance, Dillinger's activity begets new laws and increased surveillance which causes the mob to turn a cold shoulder when he attempts to hideout in Chicago. Multiple machine gun shootouts heighten the action, additionally two cleverly executed jail breaks by Dillinger (not including the opening prison break) display his brazen ability to elude punishment. From what is known about the historical figure of Dillinger the film adheres to certain truths but doesn't make the reference obvious. In one scene we see Dillinger after being initially arrested getting his picture taken for the newspapers. Dillinger has his arm around the shoulder of a prosecutor and his thumb and forefinger are making a gun sign. In real life this photo op with its message to Dillinger's gang happened. When the moment comes in the film it's briefly seen and from the side, maybe with someone standing in the way. There's a matter of factness to Mann's version of history. It's like he striving for the upmost accuracy concerning settings and incidents but then he utilizes some new millennium digital camera voodoo. What transpires during Public Enemies is beautifully realized and thoughtfully composed but the look sure ain't Technicolor. You see the texture of the clothing down to the ripple and the details on the car window frame or actor's faces reveal pits and pores. I have never seen such dark shades of the color blue (the hats and coats especially) in a movie. When Mann and DP Dante Spinotti blow out windows and light sources you see that solarization effect like you would see with a camcorder. In one sense there's an obvious design to the handheld widescreen lensing, yet every several minutes Mann throws in a shot where the face of the actor is too orange. It's like you want to go over and adjust the television only the image is 30-feet wide. This neo-classicism Mann offers only makes the film more powerful. Someone watching this film 100 years from now wouldn't even know when digital photography replaced analog cinematography and would think that the film was shot with equipment peculiar to its era. Look at James Cagney films from the early 30s. Are the drive-bys and tommy gun play in those scenes realistic to the time or movie invention? Public Enemies really revolves around the story of Dillinger and his girlfriend Billie Frechette (a vulnerable Marion Cotillard) who went to jail for a few years on the charge of harboring a criminal. Their relationship binds most of the movie together. Frechette's incarcerated during the time Dillinger's gunned down outside of the Biograph theater. In Public Enemies' final scene a federal agent, played with humility by Stephen Lang, visits her in prison. This moment and what follows wraps up the film so succinctly you feel that Mann found the perfect ending to the story.
