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aion-rsa · 4 years

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How Stephen King Got To Finish The Stand

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This article contains spoilers for the last two episodes of The Stand.

After nine episodes, the CBS All Access limited series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand has come to an end with a final segment written by none other than King himself.

But before we get to that, let’s recap the massive climactic events of last week’s episode eight, which was not titled “The Stand” for nothing.

After setting out on their long walk to New Vegas at the behest of a dying Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), the little party of Boulder Free Zone leaders finally arrived in Sin City to make their long-awaited stand against Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and his minions — minus one.

Stu Redman (James Marsden) has broken his leg in a fall and stayed behind at the bottom of a washout — almost certain to die there — while Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear) and Ray Brentner (Irene Bedard) were captured outside Vegas by Flagg’s right-hand goon Lloyd (Nat Wolff).

In the book, none of the three make it out of Vegas alive — along with thousands of others. Glen is the first to go, shot unceremoniously in his cell by Lloyd for laughing at Flagg to his face. In the just-concluded series, Glen is still shot by Lloyd, but this time during a show trial shown on screens all over the town and meant to rile up Flagg’s depraved supporters.

“It just seemed to me, that for one thing, the murder of Glen in the book never quite made sense to me,” says Ben Cavell as we get on the phone to discuss the end of the series.

He adds that changing Glen’s death from a private cell to a public courtroom changed its impact. “It seemed to me and us that the more dynamic version of that scene was for Glen to be challenging Flagg in front of his people,” he says. “That’s what has consequences for Flagg, is being made to look at all weak in front of the people who give him the adulation from which he derives his power.”

Larry and Ray are scheduled to die next, but not before Flagg’s “bride,” and the mother of his unborn child, Nadine (Amber Heard), hurls herself out a high-rise window after realizing she’s carrying a monster. Her crushed, disfigured head is brought before Larry to soften him up, but his resolve only strengthens, giving him the ability to be strong both for himself and Ray — not to mention the people of Boulder — when they are chained to the bottom of a pool that slowly fills with water.

Their courage sparks a mini-revolt among the denizens of Vegas, including Lloyd. At the same time, Trashcan Man (Ezra Miller) returns from the desert with a nuclear warhead in tow. The stand has been made, the tide has turned against Flagg and now God — or whatever force for good exists in the universe — takes over. A storm of clouds and lightning descend upon the casino — the clouds oddly looking like fingers — to incinerate Flagg, the warhead and New Vegas all at once, along with Larry and Ray.

The hand of God — which is how King describes it in the book and how it was envisioned, as a literal hand, in the 1994 miniseries — has always been problematic for readers and certainly for viewers of the original mini.

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“Obviously, there was a lot of talk about how much the hand of God should or should not look like a hand,” says Cavell. “I think we ended up at a very cool hybrid place, where if you want it to be a hand grasping the hotel, it certainly can be. It certainly has those five fingers of cloud coming around it. But it’s not as explicit as the fist in Yellow Submarine or the Monty Python hand coming out of the sky. That’s what we were very concerned about. I’m really happy with where we ended up with that.”

Cavell says that the starting point for the hand of God was the famous photo of the Pillars of Creation, a distant nebula snapped by the Hubble telescope. “If you look at it in a certain way, it kind of looks like fingers, but it doesn’t have to,” says Cavell. “And it is completely naturally occurring. That’s what we wanted. It was very important, at least for me, that you not be required, as a viewer, to accept the characters’ or Mother Abagail’s or anybody’s interpretation of these events.”

By the end of “The Stand,” many of the story’s major characters are dead, and the aftermath of the destruction of Vegas is even visible in the sky from Boulder — where Frannie (Odessa Young) goes into labor and precipitates the events of the ninth and final episode, “The Circle Closes.”

In the final episode, Frannie — keeping hope alive that Stu and the others will return from making their stand — gives birth, but the baby comes down with Captain Trips. However, since Frannie herself is immune, her child inherits her immunity and is able to bounce back from the disease, leaving open the possibility that the superflu will no longer be a part of their lives going forward.

At the same time, Stu — who was discovered and rescued by a returning Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke) — finally arrives home as well. But after a period of rest and recuperation, he and Frannie decide to leave behind a growing Free Zone and journey to Frannie’s hometown of Ogunquit, Maine. But along the way they face one final confrontation.

The episode was written by King himself and incorporates elements from the end of the original novel, the ending of the 1990 expanded edition, and brand new material in which Frannie falls down a well and is badly injured while Stu is out getting supplies. While down there, she has an otherworldly encounter with Flagg, who offers to save her life and provide a comfortable future for her, Stu, the baby and any other future family members in exchange for her fealty.

Frannie firmly refuses the deal, and as Stu arrives back at their camp and struggles to rescue her from the well, he receives unexpected assistance from a young Black girl who — it’s made quite clear — is an incarnation of Mother Abagail sent to help them.

First things first: did the writers’ room of The Stand break the story for the final chapter, or was it wholly developed by the master himself? “We didn’t break it,” says Cavell. “(King) had mentioned that there was this ending that he had been playing with and turning over for 30 years, this thing that had always been nagging him about the ending of the book, which was that Frannie never got her stand…that had always been eating at King. He really wanted to give her a satisfying conclusion to her arc in the book.”

Cavell says that King felt comfortable enough with the way the scripts were going for the rest of The Stand to entrust the creative team with bringing his final chapter to life. “Essentially what we arrived at was, ‘Okay, tell me where you guys are going to be able to leave it at the end of chapter eight, and I’ll pick up there,’” recalls Cavell. Asked if he gave any notes to King on his teleplay, Cavell laughs. “Whenever people ask me, ‘Did you give notes to Stephen King?’ My answer is, ‘Yes. I gave him one note, which was, “Thank you for writing this.”’”

Despite a semblance of hope throughout much of the final episode of The Stand, the show ends on an ominous note taken directly from the last pages of King’s uncut edition of the book: Flagg is reborn and appears on an island before an isolated, primitive tribe, who immediately see the levitating monster — now calling himself “Russell Faraday” — as a god.

“I love the idea that Flagg is eternal and always reborn as this beautiful Alexander Skarsgard avatar, or whatever we decide is the word for how he’s using that form,” says Cavell. “Flagg is the kind of guy who’s not going to let a little defeat like death stop him from his ultimate aim. And of course, the perfect place to go is a place that’s completely isolated, and that the disease hasn’t reached.

“It always felt like such a smart, interesting, inspiring Stephen King ending,” adds Cavell. “To have this ultimate evil, that seems to be eradicated, find a way back into the world, which was lovely, I thought.”

Cavell also says that the re-emergence of Mother Abagail in the form of the young girl — a concept original to this episode — was meant to mirror Flagg’s rebirth. “They are so much, I don’t know, photo negative versions of each other, I think King always felt that there wasn’t a symmetry in Mother Abigail having her own rebirth,” he explains. “I thought it was so smart to make it a very different kind than Flagg’s, where she’s not in her same form… I thought that was really cool and unexpected.”

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Now that The Stand has come to its conclusion, Cavell says that the experience was everything he expected it to be. “If you’re going to adapt something that big — in terms of its actual heft, the sprawl of the narrative, and how many people have read it and have been living with it for so long — it should feel big and difficult and unwieldy and enormous. And it did. It felt all of those things. But it also feels like we managed to achieve something that I think is really special, and I just am going to be eternally proud of.”

All nine episodes of The Stand are available to stream on CBS All Access.

The post How Stephen King Got To Finish The Stand appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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crystalwall · 7 years

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Gold Saints : ideals of beauty

I've always had a headcanon that Gold Saints, in addition to being excellent warriors, were the most beautiful men amongst all the Saints. And if we add up this to beauty in ancient Greece, we can see that this could be effectively true.

General things

In the Classical Period, the ideal of beauty was very simple : it was gods. The masculine beauty was youthful and athletic. The respect of the proportions was essential (this included golden section). We can see this in the statues of the gods, or of Olympic athletes.

The Apollo of the Belvedere, a Roman marble copy of a bronze original made by the athenian sculptor Leochares

In the Hellenistic Period, the respect of the proportion was a little less important, the statues tended to have more muscles for example.The natural beauty is very important : the natural complexion must be good, not too fair as if the person stay indoor all the time, not too tanned as if the person stay too much outdoor. The complexion must show a « good health ».

The Laocoön and His Sons, made by the Rhodians sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus

Kalos kagathos : the ideal of beauty

« καλὸς κἀγαθός » (kalos kagathos) is an expression used in the ancient Greek litterature. It's an shortened form of καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός, which litteraly means « beautiful and good » (the Latin equivalent is mens sana in corpore sano). It refers to the ideal of harmony of the body and the mind. The Greek athlete is the model of this beauty.

We must point out that the adjective ἀγαθός (which means good) refers to the virtue of the person, to his bravery. It also has a political sense : to be good means to be a good citizen, and so to respect the duties of the citizen.

So to be beautiful, one must have an athletic body, culture and virtue. The Greek education took it into account : the sport was as much important as the mind, the education trained equally these two points. We can compare this to the training that receive Saints : it is very physical, but they also have a more theorical education. We can see this with Marin and Seiya (she teaches him about atoms and he falls asleep), also with Doko and Shiriyu.

Greek heroes

When speaking about the kalos kagathos, the biggest examples are the mythological Greek heroes (like Achilles, Adonis, Perseus). Most of them have some things in common :

Athletic body (very tall, strong)

Long blond hair (like a lion's mane)

Virtuous (kind, brave, sense of honor, ...)

Good eloquence

Brad Pitt as Achilles in the movie « Troy »

Does this not remind you of some Saints ?

Effectively the Gold Saints could be based on mythological heroes. But for me none of them can really perfectly represent the real kalos kagathos. However the closest to pretend to this title is : Aiolos.

Aiolos is the archetype of the mythological hero :

He has an athletic body : he's tall (1m87, 6'1''), he's built and he's incredibly strong

He has blond hair (in the manga all the Gold Saints have blond hair, apart from Camus who is red-haired), although they are not very long.

He's very virtuous : he still was chosen to be the next Pope

He has a relatively good eloquence (like most of the heroes of Saint Seiya imho)

Aiolos and Athena

Plus he did one of the most heroic things of all the series : he saved baby Athena and sacrificed his life for this. He's in all case the representation of the kagathos.

If we speak more about the physical appearance I would say that Milo is the representation of the kalos.

A fanart of Milo, all credits to the artist

Furthermore the choose of the name « Milo » could refer to a famous wrestler of ancient Greece, Milo of Croton (he was said to have carried a bull on his shoulder). As I said above the athletes were the models of the Greek beauty.

Milo of Croton, by the sculptor Falconet

#saint seiya #ancient greece #beauty #greek mythology #gold saints #gold saint #achilles #milo #aiolos

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josebarrmageddon · 7 years

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Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) 10th Anniversary

Rob Zombie’s Halloween is one of the few horror remakes that I actually like. Instead of just retreading what John Carpenter’s original, he adds to the main character and core story. The first half introduces Michael Myers as a young boy, played by Daeg Faerch, who comes from a dysfunctional family. Early on, he shows signs of schizophrenia and being disturbed. One Halloween night, he finally snaps and kills his sister Judith, and his mother’s boyfriend, Ronnie. Michael’s mom, Deborah Myers(Sheri Moon Zombie) is forced to send him to an sanitarium where he is treated by Dr. Sam Loomis, played by Malcolm McDowell. During this time, we get to see more of the relationship between Michael and Loomis and how it all started. Even though Michael did a horrendous crime, he’s still a kid and he acts innocent as any other 10-year-old kid, not remembering what he even did. McDowell is great as Loomis, playing a man who is tired and defeated by Michael. Once he understands that he is pure evil, he is forced to walk away, only to return after Michael’s escape.

The second half focuses on the part everyone remembers. Laurie Strode, Taylor Scout-Compton, and her family no reside in the old Myers’ house, unbeknownst to them that Michael is coming back. It all plays the same with Laurie running in fear and confusion and Loomis working with Sheriff Brackett(Brad Dourif) to catch Michael. A lot more attention is brought to Laurie and her friends, modernizing them and giving them actual traits so that they’re not just meat for the grinder. Watching the original story unfold, now having learned about Michael’s past, leaves a bad taste in most people’s mouths. This is the point where Zombie loses the audience. For me though, I’m able to see it in a new light. What made Michael Myers scary that we didn’t know anything about him, so his appearance was more menacing. Rob Zombie’s movies mostly follow people who are not just outcasts, but disturbed and gives them some kind of humanity, whether you agree with it or not. In his version, there is a full character arc to Michael so that he’s not just a killing machine, but a child that was driven to a breaking point and his deterioration. That also makes the mask so important, it was the only thing that survived from his childhood. I for one enjoy this remake for keeping the style and heart of the original, but also being something new.

-Jose Barr (8-31-2017)

#Halloween #rob zombie #michael myers #10th Anniversary

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reaganwarren · 7 years

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The Power Rangers Movie, Death, and Resurrection: Post-First Viewing Thoughts + Real-World Context

Okay, I am not Linkara. Or any of those other Internet reviewers who grew up loving Power Rangers. I did not obsessively watch Mighty Morphin’, and the series I remember the best are Time Force, Wild Force, and Ninja Storm. I am familiar with Tommy and Kimberly and their relationship, mostly Green Ranger specific episodes and a few that focused on the Pink Ranger. I might also have seen Power Rangers SPD at some point. I remember “villain turns out to be a ranger’s sister” and some other stuff. I watch Linkara’s Power Rangers retrospective for fun, despite not growing up with a lot of those series, because I like Linkara and like his reviewing style, much like how I enjoy watching Brows Held High for Kyle Kalgren and Brad Jones/the Cinema Snob. (They’re really the only ones from Channel Awesome I watch anymore these days, though I’m still fairly up-to-date with Nostalgia Critic.)

But I did see the Power Rangers movie this weekend with my dad and my friend. I am an autistic adult who does keep up with articles about murdered autistic children and autistic adults. The friend I went to see the movie with is black. Ever since the beginning of my college career, the media and internet has had an onslaught of stories about murdered black teenagers and adults. Be it police brutality or hate crimes or . . . whatever else there is.

Spoilers under the cut.

Now, I had heard that the Blue Ranger was going to be a black autistic guy in the movie. Which, cool! Yay! Everyone was really celebrating that, and these people had seen the movie. Then I saw the movie and was pretty happy with his depiction as an autistic character. He was one of the crew and just happened to be autistic. Him being autistic wasn’t plot-relevant, but it was an important aspect of who he was as a person and (I like to think) gave him an advantage when it came to morphing.

Billy very clearly was an important character to the screenwriters. He was almost always front and center, he was the most developed, and he was the one the audience clearly cared about the most. Specifically because we got to know him so well. Much more than the other five. (Especially more than the Yellow Ranger, but her character was very closed off for very good reasons. She describes her family as “normal” but her mother was a fucking nightmare. Her family is not normal, even if they’re all straight but her. She avoids labeling herself as lesbian or bisexual specifically because it will put her in danger at home. She’s closeted for good reasons, and she still doesn’t know the Rangers that well as people. She doesn’t owe them anything. BUT ANYWAY this isn’t about her. Well, it is about the Yellow Ranger and Trini, but not THIS Trini.)

Narratively, it makes sense that the audience would get attached to Billy. He’s the most developed, probably the most popular and well-liked as you’re sitting there in the audience, watching this quirky kid who info-dumps and needs a little guidance from his new best friend (Jason/the Red Ranger) but otherwise can handle himself.

So to prove they’re dark and gritty now, they decide to introduce actual death to the Power Rangers story. By having Rita kill Billy after she threatens to kill Zack when she’s trying to get the information about the Zeo Crystal out of them. He tells her, she mocks them, she kills him. Billy is actually dead.

The black, autistic character the audience has grown to love is killed.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was POWER RANGERS. Something adapted from a KIDS SHOW. The threat of death is sometimes there, sure, but it never actually HAPPENS. Certainly in nothing I remember from the various Power Rangers’ series I’ve watched. (I can’t really remember what happened to the dad in Ninja Storm, but wasn’t he turned into a guinea pig or something? Point is, I sure as heck don’t remember people actually dying in these shows.)

And it felt like a punch to the gut, even if I didn’t quite believe they’d leave him dead, because . . . why’d you have to do that, movie? You’re not DBZ, you’re not Yu-Gi-Oh. You didn’t have to kill anybody, you don’t have to be dark and gritty, you’re POWER RANGERS. It’s fine to do something different, but that isn’t fair.

It isn’t fair to take something that I rarely see - a non-stereotyped autistic person who isn’t treated like he has to change how he behaves in order to fit in and deserve friendship and love - in anything, let alone something as popular and franchise-y as Power Rangers. Then there’s the fact that Billy isn’t just autistic, he’s also black, and why does the black guy always have to die? Why? Why’d you have to do this, movie? And more importantly, why didn’t anyone tell me????? In everything I read about him being autistic, why didn’t anyone give a heads-up of “he was going to die”? When we live in a world where parents and caregivers of autistic children murder them because . . . the reasons don’t even matter. They die because they’re autistic. Because they’re disabled. And so many black young men have died due to racism. It’s every damn day in real life, why did it have to be in my escapist movie too?

Then, instead of Zordon resurrecting himself like he had been planning throughout the movie, he resurrects Billy instead.

Billy is valued by his team and his friends so much that Zordon, who has truly believed that these teenagers were going to doom the Earth, chose to allow Billy to come back to life instead.

Then the rest of the movie happens, and . . . personally, I still wish they just hadn’t killed Billy at all, but . . . it did mean something. Something significant.

With absolutely no confusion, they say that Billy has value, that Billy is important to them. That his blackness and his autism does not make him less valuable to the team - or less important a friend.

And if that was all, I wouldn’t be writing this. But then there are the two car crashes in the beginning of the movie. And the fact that Thuy Trang died in a car accident on September 3, 2001.

The first car accident in the movie is how Jason/the Red Ranger gets caught for pulling a prank with a bull in the school gym locker room and it . . . is very artistic, but very visceral in that it’s not exactly a POV shot, but that camera is IN the car and you’re experiencing what it’s like to be stuck in a car that is rolling over and crashing and it was chilling.

The second one has all five of the Rangers in it, and three of them are not wearing seat belts.

According to Thuy Trang’s wikipedia page, one of the people in the car with her was contradictory in interviews about whether or not Trang was wearing a seat belt when she was in the accident.

Trang’s death was felt strongly by her original cast members.

And in the second car crash of the movie, they’ve just gotten their powers. It’s the only reason they don’t all die in the movie.

I don’t actually know if all this has anything to do with each other as far as creator intention is concerned. Again, I’m not Linkara. I’m bad at research. But.... the theme of resurrection is still in the movie. At first, it feels pointless. Why add this?

But they survived a car crash that should have killed them. They resurrected Billy after he was murdered by Rita. Thuy Trang died in a car crash at 27 years old.

It feels connected. I don’t know where to go from here, but it feels connected.

#power rangers

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atopfourthwall · 8 years

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Thoughts on the Director's Cut of Exorcist III

So, took me a bit to finally set aside some time to watch it, but I did – I have now watched the Director’s cut of Exorcist III, AKA Legion! I have thoughts!

Spoilers below the cut!

First of all, I don’t begrudge the fact that the Legion cut had to use VHS footage for the missing scenes. The fact that I’m able to see an alternate version of my favorite horror movie at all is still pretty damn cool, with alternate takes of several lines and a few added scenes and pieces of dialogue that may not make the film THAT much different aside for the ending, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The best aspects for me are expansions on previous scenes. Some are unnecessary, like a brief bit where Lt. Kinderman is looking over the file for the man in cell 11, commenting on how sparse it is and having the Doctor summon Nurse Allerton to comment on what the man looked like when he was admitted to the hospital. Like I said, it’s unnecessary – cutting directly from Kinderman wanting to see the file to being with the Nurse is faster and more efficient, getting out the information that Kinderman thinks it’s Father Karras without padding.

Other bits, though, add some additional layers to the movie. For instance, when Kinderman is visiting Father Dyer in the hospital, multiple nurses come by the room to interrupt them, one of whom is there to take blood… except Father Dyer’s blood has already been taken. Combine that with Nurse Keating going to the wrong room when delivering drugs and Kinderman commenting on how unsecured the drug cart is, we get the impression that the hospital is being poorly run, helping explain why nobody notices when one of the patients is possessed. It also could hint about Dr. Temple’s connection – the stress from the man in cell 11 is getting to him and causing him to be a poorer administrator.

There are other things – an expansion of Kinderman and Dyer’s conversation in the restaurant, coming from them discussing “It’s a Wonderful Life” is unnecessary, but welcome as it helps build their friendship up even more. A good cut made (and the footage later utilized for the very end of the movie) is that Kinderman has Father Karras’ body and coffin exumed, which he is able to quickly identify is not Karras, along with another scene where the University President explains who the body is in the coffin. I’ll get into why the cut was good in a moment, but definitely cutting the scene with the University President made sense, since the Gemini Killer pretty easily explains who it is during one of his rantings – that when his body rose up, Brother Feyn had a heart attack in fear and thus obviously the Gemini Killer put the body in the coffin. The information is conveyed quickly without a scene that exists purely for exposition.

Now, here are the two big mistakes in my eyes that I think makes the theatrical cut superior. Even with additional scenes, the originally-filmed ending sucks. It just sucks. Instead of an exorcism, Kinderman returns to the hospital and shoots the man in cell 11 three times. That’s it – he just shoots him. It’s completely unsatisfying after all the build-up and makes the attack by the possessed-nurse into the climax of the film, and that scene is not exactly high art. Hell, the novel’s ending is pretty unsatisfying, too, from what I’ve read – the idea that the Gemini Killer dies when his father dies (since tormenting his father was ultimately the Gemini Killer’s goal) is just narratively unsatisfying. After all, what is accomplished? Some people are murdered, Kinderman is lectured to for an hour, and then the Gemini Killer just DIES. Hell, that means that Kinderman himself doesn’t even contribute to the finale. At least in the original filmed ending he’s the one who ends the Gemini Killer, but even that is unsatisfying because it’s too EASY. Again – people murdered, Kinderman lectured to for an hour… and then he shoots the Gemini Killer. Just shoot the serial killer and problem solved. What exactly was the Gemini Killer’s endgame for this scenario? Did he think after the attack on his family that Kinderman would just let him get away with all that?

The studio made the right decision with the exorcism, frankly. It not only gave us spectacle – a big scene that the slower-paced movie was building up to, but it showed off how powerful and dangerous the Gemini Killer was. Sure, he could possess people, but even in a straightjacket having the demon inside him protected him from potential attacks like Kinderman made. It also gives a lot more meaning to the title – two people in the same body is not exactly a legion. THREE in a body is more like it – Karras, the Gemini Killer, and Pazuzu. For that matter, this leads us into the other major problem with this version: there’s NO Jason Miller in this. When he recites “Death Be Not Proud,” it’s Brad Dourif who does it (including excising the line “I was only 21 when I died,” which never really made sense but was a good line anyway). For that matter, almost ALL of the scenes between Kinderman and the Gemini Killer are from the original version. I kind of understand this one, since I get the impression by doing that William Peter Blatty never wanted the voice distortion they did to Brad Dourif – occasionally making his voice deeper or higher. I actually rather like it, myself, but a bigger problem with doing so is that the line delivery isn’t as strong and he doesn’t have as much emotional range in this. In the theatrical cut, when the Gemini Killer talks about removing blood from a body without a single drop leaking to the ground, he’s gleeful at his “art,” how skillful he is at it, but here it’s pretty flatly delivered. The only time it reaches that same level of intensity is when he screams about the torment of Father Karras, mentioning that “he is inside with us.” The fact that it’s VHS footage significantly helps, since the poor lighting makes it look like his eyes have gone slightly demonic with the faint shades of light on it.

But yeah, the alternate takes of this mess with the pacing of the whole thing, not helped by the fact that there’s no incidental music in the background in this version. The music in the original wasn’t over the top, but it was sinister-sounding and gave the right amount of noise and menace. And don’t get me wrong – Brad Dourif still gives a great performance, but it’s just not as powerful as the theatrical cut. Although one bizarre thing is that during the reshoots, they must have filmed in a different space than before – the wall behind the Gemini Killer is made of bricks, but in the theatrical cut the wall is padded (which frankly makes more sense for people in a disturbed ward, anyway). Excising Jason Miller is the biggest crime, though. Since both Kinderman and Dyer have been recast, this new version gives the impression that Brad Dourif is supposed to look like Father Karras, which doesn’t work at all. At least George C. Scott and Ed Flanders look the right age for it being 15 years after the first movie, but Brad Dourif is clearly younger than Damien and has the wrong hair style and color. Miller also has the advantage of having a pretty damn good voice and gives a fantastic performance in the few bits he’s in in the theatrical cut – a deep, controlled voice that sucks you in. It’s still the Gemini Killer talking, of course, but that’s just it – you only really see the real man inside when he “loses control” with an outburst screaming that he’s alive. And that’s another thing – we the audience are left to wonder when we first see Damien what his deal is, but then the Brad Dourif switch and as he explains – “If you looked with the eyes of faith, you’d see me.” The audience is seeing something that Kinderman can’t – the real person he’s talking to, and it isn’t his friend.

Tying it back to the finale, though, it’s even MORE important for Jason Miller to be in the movie. In the director’s cut, Damien isn’t a presence – he’s just a bag of flesh that’s being used by the Gemini Killer. Since we never really see or hear Damien at any point, it feels unfair to see his character used like this after his noble sacrifice at the end of the first movie. In this version, with the exorcism intact, it’s once again Damien who helps save the day – asserting control long enough for Kinderman to shoot him and save him. Now don’t get me wrong – the Father Morning character was poorly set up and needed at least a scene between him and Kinderman to remind the audience of who he is and how he would know what he needed to do (IE how he knew Damien was in there and needed to be exorcised or how he got access to the disturbed ward, when they established earlier how difficult it is to get inside), but the theatrical cut robs Damien of any agency or his final redemption.

Overall, it was fun to see and I don’t regret buying it, but honestly the Theatrical Cut IS a superior film to the Directors’ cut IMHO. Definitely support it, though, because it’s a great movie and the Blu-Ray looks fantastic.

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jehanimation · 8 years

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Celebrating the undersung heroism of The Peanuts Movie

In December 2015, a movie reboot of one of history’s most beloved entertainment brands was released in cinemas, and it took the world by storm. That movie was not The Peanuts Movie.

Not that I’m setting myself up as an exception to that. Like pretty much everyone else, I spent the tail-end of 2015 thoroughly immersing myself in all things Star Wars: The Force Awakens, drinking deeply of the hype before seeing it as many times as I could - five in total - before it left theatres. In the midst of all that Jedi madness, I ended up totally forgetting to see The Peanuts Movie, Blue Sky Studios’ well-reviewed adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s classic newspaper strip, which I’d been meaning to catch over the festive period. But then, it’s not as though the schedulers made it easy for me; in the US, there had been a buffer zone of a month between the launches of the two films, but here in the UK, Peanuts came out a week after Star Wars; even for this animation enthusiast, when it came to a choice between seeing the new Star Wars again or literally any other film, there was really no contest at all.

A year later, belatedly catching up with the movie I missed at the height of my rekindled Star Wars mania proved an eye-opening experience, and places Blue Sky’s film in an interesting context. With a $246.2 million worldwide gross, The Peanuts Movie did well enough to qualify as a hit, but it remains the studio’s lowest earner to date; in retrospect, it seems likely that going head-to-head with Star Wars and the James Bond movie Spectre didn’t exactly maximise its chances of blockbuster receipts. Yet in an odd way, modest, unnoticed success feels like a fitting outcome for The Peanuts Movie, a film that acts as a perfectly-formed celebration of underappreciated decency in a world of bombast and bluster. Charlie Brown, pop culture’s ultimate underdog, was never fated to emerge victorious in a commercial battle against Han Solo and James Bond, but his movie contains a grounded level of heartfelt sympathy for the small-scale struggles of unassumingly ordinary folk that higher-concept properties don’t have the time to express. The Peanuts Movie is a humbly heroic film about a quietly laudable person, made with understated bravery by underrated artists; I hope sincerely that more people will discover it like I did for years to come, and recognise just how much of what it says, does and represents is worth celebrating.

CELEBRATING... BLUE SKY STUDIOS

Before giving praise to The Peanuts Movie itself, it’d be remiss of me not to throw at least a few kind words in the direction of Blue Sky Studios - a group of filmmakers who I’m inclined to like, somewhat despite themselves, and who don’t always get very kind things written about them. After all, the 20th Century Fox subsidiary have been in the CGI feature animation mix since 2002, meaning they have a more established pedigree than most studios, and their long-running Ice Age franchise is a legitimately important, formative success story within the modern era of American animation. Under the creative leadership of Chris Wedge, they’ve managed to carve and hold a niche for themselves in a competitive ecosystem, hewing close to the Shrek-inspired DreamWorks model of fast-talking, kinetic comedy, but with a physical slapstick edge that marked their work out as distinct, at least initially. Sure, the subsequent rise of Illumination Entertainment and their ubiquitous Minions has stolen that thunder a little, but it’s important to remember that Ice Age’s bedraggled sabretooth squirrel Scrat was the CGI era’s original silent comedy superstar, and to recognise Blue Sky’s vital role in pioneering that stylistic connection between the animation techniques of the 21st century and the knockabout nonverbal physicality of formative 20th century cartooning, several years before anyone else thought to do so.

For all their years of experience, though, there’s a prevailing sense that Blue Sky have made a habit of punching below their weight, and that they haven’t - Scrat aside - established the kind of memorable legacy you’d expect from a veteran studio with 15 years of movies under their belt. Like Illumination - the studio subsequently founded by former Blue Sky bigwig Chris Meledandri - they remain very much defined by the influence of their debut movie, but Blue Sky have unarguably been a lot less successful in escaping the shadow of Ice Age than Illumination have in pulling away from the orbit of the Despicable Me/Minions franchise. Outside of the Ice Age series, Blue Sky’s filmography is largely composed of forgettable one-offs (Robots, Epic), the second-tier Rio franchise (which, colour palette aside, feels pretty stylistically indistinct from Ice Age), and a pair of adaptations (Horton Hears a Who!, The Peanuts Movie) that, in many ways, feel like uncharacteristic outliers rather than thoroughbred Blue Sky movies. Their Ice Age flagship, meanwhile, appears to be leaking and listing considerably, with a successful first instalment followed by three sequels (The Meltdown, Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Continental Drift) that garnered successively poorer reviews while cleaning up at the international box office, before last year’s fifth instalment (Collision Course) was essentially shunned by critics and audiences alike. Eleven movies in, Blue Sky are yet to produce their first cast-iron classic, which is unfortunate but not unforgivable; much more troubling is how difficult the studio seems to find it to even scrape a mediocre passing grade half the time.

Nevertheless, while Blue Sky’s output doesn’t bear comparison to a Disney, a Pixar or even a DreamWorks, there’s something about them that I find easy to root for, even if I’m only really a fan of a small percentage of their movies. Even their most middling works have a certain sense of honest effort and ambition about them, even if it didn’t come off: for example, Robots and Epic - both directed by founder Chris Wedge - feel like the work of a team trying to push their movies away from cosy comedy in the direction of larger-scale adventure storytelling, while the Rio movies, for all their generic antics and pratfalls, do at least benefit from the undoubted passion that director Carlos Saldanha tried to bring to his animated realisation of his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. I’ll also continue to celebrate the original Ice Age movie as a charismatic, well-realised children’s road movie, weakened somewhat by its instinct to pull its emotional punches, but gently likeable nevertheless; sure, the series is looking a little worse for wear these days, but at least part of the somewhat misguided instinct to keep churning them out seems to stem from a genuine fondness for the characters. Heck, I’m even inclined to look favourably on Chris Wedge’s ill-fated decision to dabble in live-action with the recent fantasy flop Monster Trucks; after all, the jump from directing animation to live-action is a tricky manoeuvre that even Pixar veterans like Andrew Stanton (John Carter) and Brad Bird (Tomorrowland) have struggled to execute smoothly, and the fact he attempted it at all feels indicative of his studio’s instinct to try their best to expand their horizons, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

Besides, it’s not as though their efforts so far have gone totally unrewarded. The third and fourth Ice Age movies scored record-breaking box office results outside the US, while there have also been a handful of notable successes in critical terms - most prominently, Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie, the two adaptations of classic American children’s literature directed for the studio by Steve Martino. I suppose you can put a negative spin on the fact that Blue Sky’s two best-reviewed movies were the ones based on iconic source material - as I’ve noted, the films do feel a little bit like stylistic outliers, rather than organic expressions of the studio’s strengths - but let’s not kid ourselves that working from a beloved source text isn’t a double-edged sword. Blue Sky’s rivals at Illumination proved that much in their botching of Dr Seuss’ The Lorax, as have Sony Pictures Animation with their repeated crimes against the Smurfs, and these kinds of examples provide a better context to appreciate Blue Sky’s sensitive, respectful treatments of Seuss and Charles Schulz as the laudable achievements they are. If anything, it may actually be MORE impressive that a studio that’s often had difficulty finding a strong voice with their own material have been able to twice go toe-to-toe with genuine giants of American culture and emerge not only without embarrassing themselves, but arguably having added something to the legacies of the respective properties.

CELEBRATING... GENUINE INNOVATION IN CG ANIMATION

Of course, adding something to a familiar mix is part and parcel of the adaptation process, but the challenge for any studio is to make sure that anything they add works to enrich the material they’re working with, rather than diluting it. In the case of The Peanuts Movie - a lavish computer-generated 3D film based on a newspaper strip with a famously sketchy, spartan aesthetic - it was clear from the outset that the risk of over-egging the pudding was going to be high, and that getting the look right would require a creative, bespoke approach. Still, it’s hard to overstate just how bracingly, strikingly fresh the finalised aesthetic of The Peanuts Movie feels, to the degree where it represents more than just a new paradigm for Schulz’s characters, but instead feels like a genuinely exciting step forward for the medium of CG animation in general.

Now, I’m certainly not one of those old-school puritans who’ll claim that 2D cel animation is somehow a better, purer medium than modern CGI, but I do share the common concern that mainstream animated features have become a little bit aesthetically samey since computers took over as the primary tools. There’s been a tendency to follow a sort of informal Pixar-esque playbook when it comes to stylisation and movement, and it’s only been relatively recently that studios like Disney, Illumination and Sony have tried to bring back some of that old-school 2D squash-and-stretch, giving them more scope to diversify. No doubt, we’re starting to see a spirit of visual experimentation return to the medium - the recent stylisation of movies like Minions, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania and Storks are testament to that - but even so, it feels like there’s a limit to how far studios are willing to push things on a feature film. Sure, Disney and Pixar will do gorgeous, eye-popping visual style experiments in short movies like Paperman, Inner Workings and Piper, but when it comes to the big movies, a more conservative house style invariably reasserts itself.

With the exception of a greater-than-average emphasis on physicality, Blue Sky’s typical playbook hasn’t really differed that much from their peers, which is partly why their approach to adapting Seuss and Schulz - two artists with immutable, iconic art styles of their own - have stood out so much. Their visual work on Horton Hears a Who! was groundbreaking in its own way - it was, after all, the first CG adaptation of Dr Seuss, and the result captured the eccentric impossibilities and flourishes of the source material much better than Illumination managed four years with The Lorax - yet The Peanuts Movie presented a whole new level of challenge. Where Seuss’s worlds exploded off the page with colour and life and elastic movement, Schulz’s were the very model of scribbled understatement, often eschewing backgrounds completely to preserve an expressive but essentially sparse minimalism. Seuss’s characters invited 3D interpretation with their expressive curves and body language; the Peanuts cast, by contrast, make no three-dimensional sense at all, existing only as a limited series of anatomically inconsistent stock poses and impressionist linework that breaks down the moment volume is added. It’s not that Charlie Brown, Snoopy and co are totally resistant to animation - after all, the Peanuts legacy of animated specials and movies is almost as treasured as the comic strip itself - but it’s still worth noting that the Bill Melendez/Lee Mendelson-produced cartoons succeeded mostly by committing fully to the static, spare, rigidly two-dimensional look of Schulz’s comic art, a far cry from the hyper-malleable Chuck Jones/Friz Freleng-produced style of the most famous Seuss adaptations.

Perhaps realising that Schulz cannot be made to adapt to 3D, Blue Sky went the opposite route: making 3D adapt to Schulz. The results are honestly startling to behold - a richly colourful, textured, fluidly dynamic world, populated by low-framerate characters who pop and spasm and glide along 2D planes, creating a visual experience that’s halfway between stop-motion and Paper Mario. It’s an experiment in style that breaks all the established rules and feels quite unlike anything that’s been done in CGI animation on this scale - with the possible exception of The Lego Movie - and it absolutely 100% works in a way that no other visual approach could have done for this particular property. Each moment somehow manages to ride the line of contradiction between comforting familiarity and virtuoso innovation; I’m still scratching my head, for example, about how Blue Sky managed to so perfectly translate Linus’s hair - a series of wavy lines that make no anatomical sense - into meticulously rendered 3D, or how the extended Red Baron fantasy sequences are able to keep Snoopy snapping between jerky staccato keyframes while the world around him spins and revolves with complete fluidity. Snoopy “speaks”, as ever, with nonverbal vocalisations provided by the late Bill Melendez, director of so many classic Peanuts animations; the use of his archived performance in this way is a sweet tribute to the man, but one that hardly seems necessary when the entire movie is essentially a $100 million love letter to his signature style.

I do wonder how Melendez would’ve reacted to seeing his work aggrandised in such a lavish fashion, because it’s not as though those films were designed to be historic touchstones; indeed, much of the stripped-back nature of those early Peanuts animations owed as much to budgetary constraints and tight production cycles as they did to stylistic bravery. Melendez’s visuals emerged as they did out of necessity; it’s an odd quirk of fate that his success ended up making it necessary for Blue Sky to take such bold steps to match up with his template so many decades later. Sure, you can argue that The Peanuts Movie is technically experimental because it had to be, but that doesn’t diminish the impressiveness of the final result at all, particularly given how much easier it would have been to make the film look so much worse than this. It’d be nice to see future generations of CG animators pick up the gauntlet that films like this and The Lego Movie have thrown down by daring to be adventurous with the medium and pushing the boundaries of what a 3D movie can look and move like. After all, trailblazing is a defining component of Peanuts’ DNA; if Blue Sky’s movie can be seen as a groundbreaking achievement in years to come, then they’ll really have honoured Schulz and Melendez in the best way possible.

CELEBRATING... THE COURAGE TO BE SMALL

In scaling up the visual palette of the Peanuts universe, Blue Sky overcame a key hurdle in making the dormant series feel worthy of a first full cinematic outing in 35 years, but this wasn’t the only scale-related challenge the makers of The Peanuts Movie faced. There’s always been a perception that transferring a property to the big screen requires a story to match the size of the canvas; in the animation industry, that’s probably more true now than it’s ever been. Looking back at the classic animated movies made prior to around the 1980s and 1990s, it’s striking how many of them are content to tell episodic, rambling shaggy dog stories that prioritise colourful antics and larger-than-life personalities over ambitious narrative, but since then it feels like conventions have shifted. Most of today’s crop of successful animations favour three-act structures, high-stakes adventure stories and screen-filling spectacle - all of which presents an obvious problem for a movie based on a newspaper strip about a mopey prepubescent underachiever and his daydreaming dog.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Charlie and Snoopy have had to manage a transition to feature-length narrative, but it was always unlikely that Blue Sky would follow too closely in the footsteps of the four previous theatrical efforts that debuted between 1969 and 1980. All four are characterised by the kind of meandering, episodic structure that was popular in the day, which made it easier to assemble scripts from Schulz-devised gag sequences in an essentially modular fashion; the latter three (Snoopy, Come Home from 1972, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown from 1977 and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!) from 1980) also made their own lives easier by incorporating road trips or journeys into their storylines, which gave audiences the opportunity to see the Peanuts gang in different settings. The first movie, 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown, also features a road trip aspect to its plotline, but in most respects offers the most typical and undiluted Peanuts experience of the four original films; perhaps as a result, it also feels quite aggressively padded, while its limited cast (lacking later additions like Peppermint Patty and Marcie) and intimately dour focus made it a sometimes claustrophobic cinematic experience.

Given The Peanuts Movie’s intention to reintroduce the franchise to modern audiences who may not necessarily be familiar with the original strip’s melancholic sensibilities, the temptation was always going to be to balloon the property outwards into something broad, overinflated and grand in a way that Schulz never was; it’s to be applauded, then, that The Peanuts Movie ends up as that rare CGI animation that tells a small-scale story in a focused manner over 90 minutes, resisting the urge to dilute the purity of its core character-driven comedy material with any of the family adventure elements modern audiences are used to. Even more so than previous feature-length Peanuts movies, this isn’t a film with any kind of high-concept premise; rather than sending Charlie Brown out on any kind of physical quest, The Peanuts Movie is content to offer a simple character portrait, showing us various sides of our protagonist’s personality as he strives to better himself in order to impress his unrequited love, the ever-elusive Little Red-Haired Girl. The resulting film is certainly episodic - each attempt to impress his object of affection sends Charlie Brown into new little mini-storylines that bring different classic characters to the foreground and evoke the stop-start format of Schulz’s strip, even though the content and style feel fresh - but all of the disparate episodes feel unified by the kind of coherent forward momentum and progressive character growth that Bill Melendez’s older movies never really reached for.

Indeed, it’s probably most telling that the film’s sole major concession to conventional cinematic scale - its extended fantasy side-story featuring Snoopy engaging in aerial battles in his imaginary World War I Flying Ace alter-ego - is probably its weakest element. These high-flying action sequences are intelligently conceived, injecting some real visual splendour and scope without intruding on the intimacy of the main story, but they feel overextended and only infrequently connected to the rest of the film in any meaningful way. This would be less of a problem if the Snoopy-centric narrative had effective emotional hooks of its own, but sadly there’s really not much there beyond the Boys’ Own parody trappings; any real investment in Snoopy’s dreamed pursuit of his poodle love interest Fifi is undermined by her very un-Schulz-like drippy damselness, and it becomes hard to avoid feeling that you’re watching an extended distraction from the parts of the movie you’re actually interested in. Of course, it’s arguable that an overindulgent fondness for Snoopy-related flights of fancy drawing attention away from the more grounded, meaningful exploits of Charlie Brown and friends is actually a fair reflection of the Peanuts franchise in its latter years, showing that Blue Sky were faithful to Schulz to a fault, but I wouldn’t like to focus too much on a minor misstep in a film that’s intelligent and committed about its approach to small-canvas storytelling in a way you don’t often see from mainstream animated films on the big screen.

CELEBRATING... LETTING THE ULTIMATE UNDERDOG HAVE HIS DAY

All of these achievements would count for very little, though, if Blue Sky’s movie wasn’t able to adequately capture the intellect and essence of Schulz’s work, a task that seems simultaneously simple and impossible. For such a sprawling franchise, Peanuts has proven remarkably resilient to tampering, meddling or ruination, with each incarnation - whether in print or in animation - remaining stylistically and tonally consistent, thanks to the strict control Schulz and his fastidious estate have kept over the creative direction of the series. On the one hand, this is a blessing of sorts for future stewards of the franchise, as it gives them a clear playbook to work from when producing new material; on the other hand, the unyielding strictness of that formula hints heavily at a certain brittleness to the Peanuts template, suggesting to would-be reinventors that it would take only a small misapplication of ambition to irrevocably damage the essential Schulz-ness of the property and see the result crumble to dust. This has certainly proven the case with Schulz’s contemporary Dr Seuss, one of few American children’s literature writers with a comparable standing to the Peanuts creator, and an artist whose literate, lyrical and contemplative work has proven eminently easy to ruin by misguided adapters who tried and failed to put their own spin on his classic material.

There’s no guesswork involved in saying these concerns were of paramount importance to the Schulz estate when prepping The Peanuts Movie - director Steve Martino was selected specifically on the strength of his faithful adaptation of Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, and the film’s screenplay was co-written by Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan - but even taking a cautious approach, there are challenges to adapting Schulz for mainstream feature animation that surpass even those posed by Seuss’ politically-charged poetry. For all his vaulting thematic ambition, Seuss routinely founded his work on a bedrock of visual whimsy and adventurous, primary-colours mayhem, acting as a spoonful of sugar for the intellectual medicine he administered. Schulz, on the other hand, preferred to serve up his sobering, melancholic life lessons neat and unadulterated, with the static suburban backdrops and simply-rendered characters providing a fairly direct vessel for the strip’s cerebral, poignant or downbeat musings. The cartoonist’s willingness to honestly embrace life’s cruel indignities, the callousness of human nature and the feeling of unfulfilment that defines so much of regular existence is perhaps the defining element of his work and the foundational principle that couldn’t be removed without denying Charlie Brown his soul - but it’s also something that might have felt incompatible with the needs and expectations of a big studio movie in the modern era, particularly without being able to use the surface-level aesthetic pleasure that a Seuss adaptation provides as a crutch.

I’ve already addressed the impressive way The Peanuts Movie was able to make up the deficit on visual splendour and split the difference in terms of the story’s sense of scale, but the most laudable aspect of the film is the sure-footed navigation of the tonal tightrope it had to tread, deftly balancing the demands of the material against the needs of a modern audience, which are honestly just as important. Schulz may have been a visionary, but his work didn’t exist in a vacuum; the sometime brutal nature of his emotional outlook was at least in part a reaction to the somewhat sanitised children’s media landscape that existed around him at the time, and his work acted as an antidote that was perhaps more necessary then than it is now. That’s not to say the medicinal qualities of Schulz’s psychological insights don’t still have validity, but to put it bluntly I don’t think children lack reminders in today’s social landscape that the world can be a dark, daunting and depressing place, and it feels like Martino and his team realised that when trying to find the centre of their script. Thus, The Peanuts Movie takes the sharp and sometimes bitter flavour of classic Schulz and filters it, finding notes of sweetness implicit in the Peanuts recipe and making them more explicit, creating a gentler blend that goes down smoother while still feeling like it’s drawn from the original source.

The core of this delicate work of adaptation is the film’s Charlie Brown version 2.0 - still fundamentally the same unlucky totem of self-doubt and doomed ambition he’s always been, but with the permeating air of accepted defeat diminished somewhat. This Charlie Brown (voiced by Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp) shares the shortcomings of his predecessors, but wears them better, stands a little taller and feels less vulnerable to the slings and arrows that life - and ill-wishers like Lucy Van Pelt - throw at him. Certainly, he still thinks of himself as an “insecure, wishy-washy failure”, but his determination to become more than that shines through, with even his trademark “good grief” sometimes accompanied by a wry smile that demonstrates a level of perspective that previous incarnations of the character didn’t possess. Blue Sky’s Charlie Brown is, in short, a tryer - a facet of the character that always existed, but was never really foregrounded in quite the way The Peanuts Movie does. In the words of Martino:

“Here’s where I lean thematically. I want to go through this journey. … Charlie Brown is that guy who, in the face of repeated failure, picks himself back up and tries again. That’s no small task. I have kids who aspire to be something big and great. … a star football player or on Broadway. I think what Charlie Brown is - what I hope to show in this film - is the everyday qualities of perseverance… to pick yourself back up with a positive attitude - that’s every bit as heroic … as having a star on the Walk of Fame or being a star on Broadway. That’s the story’s core.”

It’s possible to argue that leavening the sometimes crippling depression in Charlie Brown’s soul robs him of some of his uniqueness, but it’s also not as though it’s a complete departure from Schulz’s presentation of him, either. Writer Christopher Caldwell, in a famous 2000 essay on the complex cultural legacy of the Peanuts strip, aptly described its star as a character who remains “optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth”, rather than rolling over and accepting the status that his endless failures would seem to bestow upon him. Even at his most downbeat and “Charlie-Browniest”, he’s always been a tryer, someone with enough drive to stand up and be counted that he keeps coming back to manage and lead his hopeless baseball team to defeat year after year; someone with the determination to try fruitlessly again and again to get his kite in the air and out of the trees; someone with enough lingering misplaced faith in Lucy’s human decency to keep believing that this time she’ll let him kick that football, no matter how logical the argument for giving up might be.

Indeed, Charlie Brown’s dogged determination to make contact with that damn ball was enough to thaw the heart of Schulz himself, his creator and most committed tormentor - having once claimed that allowing his put-upon protagonist to ever kick the ball would be a “terrible disservice to him”, the act of signing off his final ever Peanuts strip prompted a change of heart and a tearful confession:

“All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick - he never had a chance to kick the football.”

If that comment - made in December 1999, barely two months before his death - represented Schulz’s sincere desire for clemency for the character he had doomed to a 50-year losing streak, then The Peanuts Movie can be considered the fulfilment of a dying wish. No, Charlie Brown still doesn’t get to kick the football, but he receives something a lot more meaningful - a long-awaited conversation with the Little Red-Haired Girl, realised on screen as a fully verbalised character for the first time, who provides Charlie Brown with a gentle but quietly overwhelming affirmation of his value and qualities as a human being. In dramatic terms, it’s a small-scale end to a low-key story; in emotional terms, it’s an moment of enormous catharsis, particularly in the context of the franchise as a whole. It’s in this moment that Martino’s film shows its thematic hand - the celebration of tryers the world over, a statement that you don’t need to accomplish epic feats to be a good person, that persevering, giving your all and maintaining your morality and compassion in the face of setbacks is its own kind of heroism. The impact feels even greater on a character level, though; after decades of Sisyphean struggle and disappointment, the ending of The Peanuts Movie is an act of beatific mercy for Charlie Brown, placing a warm arm around the shoulders of one of American culture’s most undeservedly downtrodden characters and telling him he is worth far more than the sum of his failures, that his essential goodness and honesty did not go unnoticed, and that he is deserving of admiration - not for being a sporting champion or winning a prize, but for having the strength to hold on to the best parts of himself even when the entire world seems to reject everything he is.

Maybe that isn’t how your grandfather’s Peanuts worked, and maybe it isn’t how Bryan Schulz’s grandfather’s Peanuts worked either, but it would take a hard-hearted, inflexible critic to claim that any of The Peanuts Movie’s adjustments to the classic formula are damaging to the soul of the property, particularly when the intent behind the changes feels so pure. The flaws and foibles of the characters are preserved intact, as is the punishingly fickle nature of the world’s morality; however, in tipping the bittersweet balance away from bitterness towards sweetness, Martino’s movie escapes the accusation of mere imitation and emerges as a genuine work of multifaceted adaptation, simultaneously acting as a tribute, a response to and a modernisation of Charles Schulz’s canon. The Peanuts Movie is clearly designed to work as an audience’s first exposure to Peanuts, but it works equally well if treated as an ultimate conclusion, providing an emotional closure to the epic Charlie Brown morality play that Schulz himself never provided, but that feels consistent with the core of the lessons he always tried to teach.

In reality, it’s unlikely Peanuts will ever be truly over - indeed, a new French-animated TV series based on the comics aired just last year - but there’s still something warmly comforting about drawing a rough-edged line under The Peanuts Movie, letting Charlie Brown live on in a moment of understated triumph 65 years in the making, remembered not for his failings but by his embodiment of the undersung heroism of simply getting back up and trying again. It’s not easy to make a meaningful contribution to the legacy of a character and property that’s already achieved legendary status on a global scale, but with The Peanuts Movie, the perennially undervalued Blue Sky gave good ol’ Charlie Brown a send-off that a spiritually-minded humanist like Charles Schulz would have been proud of - and in my book, that makes them heroes, too.

#peanuts #peanutsmovie #charles schulz #charles m. schulz #charlie brown #peppermint patty #lucy van pelt #linus van pelt #snoopy #woodstock #blue sky #blue sky studios #animation #film analysis #movies #movie critique #long post

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mastcomm · 5 years

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‘1917’ and ‘Parasite’ Are Big Winners at the BAFTAs

LONDON — “1917,” Sam Mendes’s visually extravagant World War I drama that takes viewers into the chaos of the trenches was the big winner at the EE British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, taking seven awards including best film.

Mendes was also named best director at the event, better known as the BAFTAs, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.

The haul adds to the movie’s wins for best drama and best director at the Golden Globes and will increase hype around the movie in the run-up to the Oscars.

“In the midst of all this hoopla, it’s sometimes easy to forget the actual experience of shooting a movie,” Mendes said, accepting his best director award. “I had a kind of director’s paradise in this film that I think I’ll never, ever have again.”

The sweep for “1917” came despite the film receiving mixed reviews in Britain. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, called it “two hours of amphetamine-rush cinema” and “instantly, an Oscar-night front-runner.”

But some were more dismissive. Robbie Collin, writing in The Daily Telegraph, called it “emotionally inert.”

“I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s technique while feeling almost nothing else about it at all,” he wrote.

Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” — a thriller about a poor family who insinuate themselves into the lives of a pampered household, and the first Korean film to be nominated for the best picture Oscar — was the night’s other big winner, taking the awards for best film not in the English language and best original screenplay.

Bong, accepting the screenplay prize, said he used to write in coffee shops. “I never imagined I’d be standing here at the Royal Albert Hall,” he added, clearly overjoyed.

“Joker,” the movie based on the comic book character, had been tipped to win big at the awards, after it secured 11 nominations in January, the most for any film. In the end, it won only three, with Joaquin Phoenix as best actor for the title role being the biggest.

The run-up to the BAFTAs was dominated by complaints about the lack of diversity among the nominees. No person of color was nominated in the best acting categories, and no woman was shortlisted for best director.

Such complaints have also hit this year’s Golden Globes and Academy Awards, but in the case of the BAFTAs, even Amanda Berry, chief executive of the body that organizes the awards, said she was “very disappointed” by the situation. The body had “hoped we’d see at least one female director,” she told the BBC in January.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts quickly announced a full and thorough review of its voting procedures, but that did not stop the criticism. Steve McQueen, the British director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” told The Guardian the awards risked becoming “irrelevant, redundant and of no interest or importance” without change.

The issue wasn’t missing from the award ceremony itself. Joaquin Phoenix said he felt “conflicted” when he accepted the best actor award for “Joker.”

“I think that we send a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here,” he said. “That’s the message we send.”

Prince William, the president of BAFTA, referred to it, too, when introducing the event’s final award. “In 2020 and not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process,” he said. “That simply cannot be right in this day and age,” he added.

Other major winners at the BAFTAs included Renée Zellweger, who won best actress for her portrayal of Judy Garland at the end of her life in “Judy”; Laura Dern, who won best supporting actress for “Marriage Story”; and Brad Pitt, who won best supporting actor for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — all three repeating their successes from the Golden Globes.

Pitt missed the event, but his acceptance speech — which included a reference to Britain’s exit from the European Union on Friday — got one of the evening’s biggest laughs. “Hey Britain, heard you just became single,” he said in a speech, read out by the actress Margot Robbie. “Welcome to the club.”

“The Irishman,” Martin Scorsese’s latest epic, failed to win any awards.

The BAFTAs are widely viewed as a bellwether for the Academy Awards, because there is some overlap between the 6,500-strong membership of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which organizes the BAFTAs, and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This year the two ceremonies are just a week apart, with the Oscars on Feb. 9.

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jurassicparkpodcast · 5 years

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Jurassic June Highlight: Dinosaurs roam the land in this post-apocalyptic Jurassic Park fan film

It’s time for another Jurassic June project highlight – and this time, we will be looking at a fantastic live-action Jurassic project.

The Jurassic Park community is arguably one of the most creative on the internet – with hundreds of people producing dinosaur filled content every week. So; imagine my delight when Brad let me know I had a new interview with another community member – Todd Jason.

Todd released a Jurassic Park fan film (Jurassic Park – Life Finds A Way) on his YouTube channel. Clocking in at around thirty-four minutes, the film is a nice romp in a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with dinosaurs. Many – such as Steven Ray Morris of See Jurassic Right – have spoken about how they would love Jurassic World 3 to be akin to something like The Planet of The Apes – and Todd’s film is a nice look at what this could present itself as.

Take a read of our Q&A below, and check out the embedded movie at the bottom of this page.

Hi Todd – thanks for taking the time to sit down with me! So firstly – how did your Jurassic Park story start? Where did your love for this franchise begin?

Every little boy has a stage in life where they’re just obsessed with dinosaurs. I am no different. I watched the first Jurassic Park almost every day growing up. What I didn’t realize at the time was that every time I watched the film, I would go into the extras menu on the DVD and watch the behind the scenes feature. I was learning how the film was made at the age of five. So, when I decided to become a filmmaker I wanted to make my own Jurassic Park movie. And so that’s how to whole thing began.

The Opening Monologue and accompanying video incorporates some nice CGI for Jurassic Park: San Diego. How did you go about achieving this?

First, thank you for complimenting the CGI. I wanted the opening scene to have shots of a functioning Jurassic Park. And right after you hear the part of the monologue “they had killed us all” all hell breaks loose. Due to limited time and limited budget I had to come up with something else. The next idea I had was to have a Fallen Kingdom moment where you have the monologue against some creepy music, there’s rain, thunder, lightning, dramatic timing with the monologue and lightning, etc.

Can you outline the basic plot for readers, and how you came up with this?

Sure, the basic plot is In-Gen created Jurassic Park San Diego in 1997 (from The Lost World). It becomes successful and they create a chain of theme parks. All the parks eventually get destroyed, and now the world is taken over by dinosaurs. And the film follows three survivors who must stay with one another to stay alive. How I came up with this story? I wanted to do something different. Most Jurassic Park fan films out there have one thing in common. They either return to Isla Sorna, Isla Nublar, or go to Site C. I didn’t want a film that was the same, I wanted to make a film that was different from the rest. One that stands out from the crowd.

How did you go about choosing the dinosaurs you wanted to feature in your short film?

Obviously, dinosaurs we’ve seen in the films. You can’t have a Jurassic Park movie without the T-Rex and the raptors. The brachiosaurus scene was to pay respects to that iconic scene from the first movie. The Spino I wanted a character to have a tragic history with. The Carnotaurus was inspired from another dinosaur movie and Fallen Kingdom. And the Stego and Ptero I wanted the audience to see them in that final shot in a herd. Kind of a poetic moment going back to Alan Grant’s famous line “they do move in herds”.

We see the Spas 12 featured which is a nice addition. Did you guys channel your inner Robert Muldoon when working on the film?

As a matter of fact, yes. While we were filming that scene with Danny (Brady Box) and the Wounded Survivor (Chad Leath), I told Brady to kneel a couple times. I chose this because that is what Muldoon does a lot before his fate is decided by the raptors.

I get the feeling that this a post-apocalpytic Jurassic story where the dinosaurs have taken over the planet. Kind of like Planet of The Apes. Was that the vibe you were going for here?

Yes that was the vibe I was going for. Great films like Planet of The Apes played a huge role when coming up with the tone of the movie.

We see the Ford Explorer here – but obviously, we are not on Nublar. Is this meant to be a fan-made Explorer which the guys stumbled across and have adopted? Almost a super fourth-wall reference to the community.

You’ve read my mind. One thing I wanted was a Jurassic Park vehicle but the original intention was the Jeep. So, I started searching throughout the Jurassic Park Motor Pool trying to find a Jeep in my area. I live in the small town of Liberty Hill Texas, about 30 miles from Austin. All the Jeeps were from Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston. Too far of a drive for them. So, I found somebody in Austin who had the Ford Explorer and he was willing to lend it to us for as long as we needed it. We had it for two weeks, and it was a great moment seeing that vehicle sit in my garage. One of my goals in life is to build the Jurassic Park Jeep someday.

In the film, we see a scene where an injured person talks about humans attacking other humans. We never really see this in other Jurassic films, so how important was it to convey this in yours?

It's important to me that I included this in the film because, I think most Jurassic Park fan films focus too much on the dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, we all love our precious dinosaurs. But I feel like having a human threat as well as a dinosaur threat, it’s more realistic. If a zombie apocalypse were to happen right now, the walking dead wouldn’t be your only concern.

One of the big adversaries we see in the film is the Carnotaurus. Was this inspired by its presence in Fallen Kingdom?

It kind of was. Like I said earlier growing up I was constantly watching Jurassic Park. That wasn’t the only dinosaur movie, Disney made an animated movie back in 2000 called “Dinosaur”. I love that movie, and one of the main antagonists was a Carnotaurus. It used to scare me a lot when I was a kid. So, when I was writing the script I wanted to include the Carnotaurus. Then Fallen Kingdom came out and we see the Carnotaurus. That just gave me more motivation to keep that dinosaur in the film.

I love how the Spinosaurus was identified as a Baryonyx later in the film. Was this a nod to Billy misidentifying the Spino?

Yes, it was a nod to Billy. You’ll notice during that scene, I never showed the full body of the Spino until the final shot in that scene. That last shot confirms that it’s a Spinosaurus. But if someone is a serious JP fan like you and me, then you’ll immediately know it’s the Spino because we know how it looks and how it sounds. For people who are not a serious fan, I think not showing the full body until the end is more powerful and adds to the horror of the moment.

Later, in the film we see the JP gates and fencing. So – going back to my earlier point, is this perhaps intended to be Nublar? Or did you decide you wanted to take some creative liberties so you could include reference to the original park?

I wanted to use my own creative voice when it came to this film. Before Isla Nublar, John Hammond start working on the San Diego park. I thought to myself, “what if he never thought of Isla Nublar?”. This goes back to what I said earlier about being different from the rest of the JP fan films out there. That scene you’re referring to is supposed to be a park that was in construction and almost finished. That’s why you just see “Jurassic Park” at the gate and not “Jurassic Park Wichita” or something like that. But in the end, it became a scene that pays respects to the film that started it all.

CGI is a big factor of the film and is very well done. How was this achieved?

Thank you. The CGI is one thing I really wanted to sell, and that was the goal in post-production. A couple years ago, I started conducting CGI tests for dinosaurs, and the first one was with green screen CGI you can download from YouTube. Then I stumbled upon a 3D program called Blender. It’s a free, yes, a FREE 3D program. I started learning it and creating my own dinosaur animations. It wasn’t until I recreated that epic wide shot from Jurassic Park where the T-Rex steps through the fence and does that iconic roar. At that point, I realized that I was ready to make the movie. Now ILM is the best visual effects company in the film industry, they have access to all this expensive 3D software. What I learned overtime, however, is that it’s not the software; it’s how you use it.

The film gives fans something long anticipated. The Spinosaurus/T-Rex rematch. How important was it to you that this got an inclusion in the film?

Ah the epic rematch. The idea behind that is a debate between fans I believe. A lot of people want the rematch and a lot of people don’t want the rematch. But I wanted the climax of the film to be huge, go out with a bang. So that is why I included it. One of my favourite shots in the whole film is that epic 360 shot where our heroes are hiding between two trees, the camera turns around and you see both animals in an all-out brawl. I love that shot and it’s meant to reference the final fight with the indominus from Jurassic World. The amazing long take of Blue and Rexy destroying the Indominus.

Finally – anything else you’d like to add?

One experience I will never forget.

The day we filmed the Spino scene with Danny and Lauren (Jamie Brownwell), we all rode to the location in the JP Ford Explorer. It was the only vehicle we had. It was time for a lunch break so we all got in the Ford and drove to Dairy Queen. We sat by a window so I can always have eyes on the car. I didn’t want anyone to screw with it. I see a father and his son walk up to the car and start looking at it. I watch them and I see the kid just lose his mind. He was wearing a Jurassic Park shirt as well. He was so excited and his dad took a picture of him next to the car.

I then later walked up to them and I told them about it, where I got, why we had it, etc. It was just a great moment to see and one I will never forget.

Thanks, once again, to Todd for sitting down and working on this fun interview! I always love gaining insight into fan projects – and I think it’s fascinating that so many of us have our own ideas for stories and follow on pieces which have their own unique merits. Wherever the films go in the future, I think the Jurassic community will continue to make fun alternative and creative projects which explore this incredible universe.

Make sure you check out Life Finds A Way below.

Written by: Tom Fishenden

#article #jurassic june #jurassic park life finds a way fan film #life finds a way #todd jason #jurassic park fan film #tom fishenden

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recentnews18-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art/

John Waters Takes Us on a Funny, Filthy Tour of His Fine Art

Walking behind John Waters last week while he talked to a small gang of critics, reporters, and art world insiders about his pieces included in John Waters: Indecent Exposure at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I got everything I wanted: the tailored, outlandish clothes (black and gray suit printed with a geometric repeat, splashy red slip-ons), the big smile, the giant eyes, the pencil-thin mustache, the head shaped like a light bulb, and the candor and brilliance keen enough to cut glass.

The aphorisms flowed: “The only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity.” And his timing was perfect: “I hate celebrity, too.”

But this material—the photographs made to look like film stills from imaginary movies, interactive pieces, a G-rated version of Pink Flamingos acted entirely by children, some weighty installation pieces, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson puppets, sculptures, ephemera—this was all new to me.

Even with Waters as a guide, there was more to his work than I could grasp, because a lot of it references (often obscurely) the work of other artists and sensibilities I’m unfamiliar with—outsider art, if you will. And this despite the fact that I’m a longtime consumer of his films, books, and stage appearances.

Waters’ art is defined and liberated by his influences, his hometown of Baltimore, gay culture, DIY punk ethos, and a society obsessed with celebrity. Most of this work would have been lost on me were it not for his enthusiastic answers to the one question I had at every stop along his tour—Why?

The upside is, he wants to talk, to explain. He wants you to get it. But he doesn’t give everything away. Some stuff requires the viewer to put in the same years of research and thought that Waters went through to make this stuff. Who has that kind of time?

John Waters means different things to different people. Musical theater nerds might love the remake of Hairspray adapted from the Broadway musical that was adapted from a subversive film John Waters made in 1988. A film buff might consider only his early cult films that were played as midnight movies: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), and Pink Flamingos, while clamouring for his rarely seen earlier movies, some of which are included in an installation at the BMA (the show runs through January 6, 2019).

At first glance, much of it seems pointless or contrived. Without packing the show’s catalog/coffee table book and reading along the way, even a seasoned collector of contemporary art might well stand staring for a long time in a losing struggle to comprehend. More research, thought, and archiving went into each work than I would have imagined. The more you know, the better it gets.

Waters prefaces his tour of the show by saying, “I am always trying to imagine the worst that can go wrong in the art business and the movie business. I am a fan of both. I always just make fun of things I love. That’s the point.” Every few steps, he reminded us, like a mantra, “I’m always trying to think of the worst thing that could happen in show business and celebrate it.”

“It’s about images,” he said. “I believe that people remember film stills. They don’t remember film plots. Everybody remembers From Here to Eternity and making out in the water. Who knows what the movie was about? That thing with Divine with the red dress in Pink Flamingos is more famous than anything that happened in the movie.”

There is an urgency to his photographic art—maybe to everything he does—implied in the phrase that continued to crop up: “I had to…”

His output as a fine art photographer began out of necessity. In 1992, he needed, but didn’t have a still for Multiple Maniacs. “So I just put the VHS on and took a picture in the dark on the TV screen. And that’s what started it, because it had a different quality. It doesn’t work digitally. I still have to take it with real film with a camera. This was the first one,” he said, pointing to a photograph entitled “Divine in Ecstasy.” “So I finally had a still. This is kind of how it started.”

Waters curates frames from others’ movies or photographs into assemblages all his own. “I’m going into other people’s movies, taking images, and putting them in a new narrative.” So curator as creator, he filched Ingmar Bergman’s Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal and spun it into “this famous shot of [the Kennedys] getting off the plane. But I had Bergman’s Death following them, which was true, though.” The import of the original photograph is tragic: the president and first lady deplaning in Texas on November 22, 1963. Now add Death with the sickle shadowing them, and you have “Grim Reaper.” Why is it okay to laugh? “Camelot” and the superficiality of stylish Jackie pushes JFK’s horrific death into the background. Years of cinematic depictions dull the shock. Waters turns up the volume on the iconography and lowers it on the gruesome head wound, while commenting on his obsession with Bergman’s films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“And Ingmar Bergman, I saw his films at the same time [as the Kennedy assassination]. That was it. I loved him from then on.” Fine, but I was getting lost. Here and elsewhere in the show, Waters references movies (not to mention other cultural totems and taboos) so obscurely that only someone who has watched every film ever made will get what’s going on. Luckily that someone and I have been friends for 30 years.

So when I got home, I called my friend for help. As soon as I showed him “Grim Reaper” and mentioned another Bergman-influenced sequence, “Puking in Cinema,” the floodgates opened.

“I bet if you showed me the stills from “Puking in Cinema,” I’d know what films they were all from,” said my friend. And he did, rattling off the titles while doing push ups: “Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Persona, and The Silence all have puking. So, now there’s puking in Waters’ movies, and I guess his art, too.”

I don’t know if this is the correct interpretation or not, but aesthetics before investigation. If it’s just puking, who cares? I’d hate “Puking in Cinema” if I hadn’t had my friend. But now I don’t, because I realize it’s reverential through the cinephile lens. It certainly contextualized Waters’s quote about his love for Bergman, and maybe why he’s called the Prince and not the King of puke (that would have to be Bergman himself).

I was on my own to interpret and figure out most of Waters’ work for myself. About “Lana Backwards,” Waters said, “Lana Turner. I always noticed they kept her one beat longer when she left a room. The director never cut. I was fascinated at that. I realized women wanted to see the back of her outfits, and the men wanted to see her ass.” Eight stills of Lana’s backside prove his point. Collectively, unconsciously, moviegoers agreed implicitly that they needed a longer look at Lana’s ass in the days before pressing pause. But only John Waters noticed.

His habit of “going into things no one else notices in a movie” sharpened his democratic eye, such that, as far as he’s concerned, “there is no such thing as a bad movie. You can find one frame in there that’s great. When you don’t like the movie, stop watching it as a moviegoer. Watch it like you’re at an art show. Just concentrate on the furniture or the color blue, and then all movies are good.”

I sat starstruck during my private Q&A with Waters. I contemplated his mustache, and saw a few greys mixed in the black line. I wondered if it’s tattooed, then remembered it’s not, because he once let Justin Bieber pencil it in. I forgot every question I had. Instead of kicking me out of my chair and shouting, “Next!” he graciously moved the conversation for me. Intuitively, he understood the question at the heart of my blathering: What’s up with the marriage of true crime, celebrity, and the play on tabloid who-wore-it-best in his “Manson Copies…” photo juxtapositions? Who but John Waters noticed Charles Manson’s evolving fashion?

“Manson Copies” is a series of paired photos. Each set puts a photo of Manson beside a photo of a celebrity, and in each set, Manson and the celebrity are somehow sartorially similar. “The first one—I saw this picture of Manson I had never seen with his hair cut like Divine’s in Pink Flamingos. [“Manson Copies Divine’s Hairdo.”] So I did that. Then, I had to wait for every parole hearing that Manson had, so I could see what his new look was. I just photographed it off the TV screen like I did for everything. Then, I had to go and find news stories of celebrities that were facing the same way in the same outfit. I had to look through everything to find a picture to match Manson’s parole hearing look, so I could say [Manson] copies this one and copies this one. I’d have to look through everything. I have Richard Gere with the same sunglasses on. Brad Pitt with the beard like [Manson] had.”

Waters gets a pass for things other people would be called weird or creepy for acknowledging. Why? His wink and nod give us permission to glimpse into stuff that was pulpy—like true crime—but has becomes mainstream, because he’s been our guide into our depraved world for 50 years. He’s not condoning it. He’s pointing it out. He’s removed from it. His art doesn’t show corpses. Instead, Charles Manson is depicted as the celebrity he became—a failed musician and cult leader, safely imprisoned, which is turning up the volume on high camp. But, lower the volume and Manson is a murderer, responsible for taking lives from victims and perpetrators.

There’s a lot of Dorothy Malone in Waters’ work, not only in “Manson copies…” but again in an eight-image sequence devoted to her popped collar, “Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Divine Copies Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Peyton Place…The Movie.” I asked my friend about this. Again, he rattled off the facts.

“Probably because she won Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind and she slowjacked the Oscar during her acceptance speech, and played a serial killer in Basic Instinct. Then, there’s Peyton Place, which was a banned book, and bestseller, and a nighttime soap with her.” He actually said much more, but I forgot everything but the highlights—just the very worst thing to do to the statue when winning Best Supporting Actress.

Celebrity rarely, if ever, accompanies talent. With that in mind, Waters pays homage to people who are known for nothing more substantial than the most vapid kind of fame. “Melissa” is a photograph of white clouds against a blue sky with the words: Starring Melissa Rivers. That’s it. That’s the photograph, and it’s a lot of things—all of them bad, so again I stood wondering, why? Once I found out, I wanted to own it.

“I’m always trying to celebrate the things that don’t work in show business,” Waters said, by way of introducing “Melissa,” which purports to be the opening credit in a movie, but a movie that never happened and never will. It may not be the stand-out piece in the show, but it made me laugh, because it’s a fantasy piece. Joan Rivers’ daughter would be hard to place on a seating chart at a dinner party. The irony to Melissa Rivers is that there is no irony.

“There is no credit,” Waters explained. “This is a completely made up credit. That ‘Starring’ above your name means you’re first billing, and Melissa, God bless her, she never was first billing in any movie that I know of. So, in a way, it’s a sad piece. If any piece is a little mean, it might be this one. But she did star in a movie where she reenacted the death-suicide of her father. She acted finding the body. So, I feel, in bad taste, we’re sister and brother.”

For Waters, unwatchable is “the worst thing you can say about a movie. It’s the worst review you can get. It’s literally unwatchable. So, I want to think, what movie can be in that category? It’s an extreme one. I had a friend who said, ‘That’s the most irresponsible movie I ever saw.’ I said, “It’s not that good.’ That would be something that is really important.” “Melissa” might fall into this category.

The simplest pieces are the most acute. One work, baldly entitled “9/11,” pairs movie title shots from Dr. Dolittle 2 and A Knight’s Tale. “This is, I think, the scariest, saddest one in the whole thing,” Waters says. “You look at these two titles and you think, Why? They’re the most forgettable movies that no one talks about. They aren’t good or bad. Why did he put these together? Well, It took me awhile to research and find out, but these were the two movies that were playing on the 9/11 planes that day.” How did he research this? Who did he call? Weighing the banality of the in-flight entertainment against the awareness of imminent death and tragedy felt heavy and trivial at the same time. A few seconds were needed to work through that. “But, they never put them in. They never even got that far. So, if there’s any optimism—it would have been worse.”

The childhood puppeteer in Waters shines forth in a few pieces, although we’re way beyond Punch and Judy territory here. One disturbing piece in particular, “Control,” could seem, if taken at face value, to condone domestic violence, although anybody familiar with Waters knows that would never happen. Still, what in the world is a Barbie-sized Tina Turner doing strung up as a marionette manipulated by Ike Turner who looks like he just slid across the stage on his knees Chuck-Berry style? Again, why?

“I liked her best when she was with him. I saw them in Baltimore in 1964, she had a mustache and a ratty mink coat, and them in a broken down school bus. That was the best show I ever saw in my life. I agree, she left, and she should have. She’s in Switzerland, about as far away as she could ever get from Ike Turner. But still, I went to the Tina Turner museum and there is no mention of Ike in it at all, so I just want to remember how great they were no matter how horrible their personal life was. I always stick up for the bad guy. I visit friends in jail. When someone gets a bad review, I call them the next morning. I’m always the one that will call you if something goes bad, so I’m trying to remember something that did go very very very bad. Kind of put it in a way that puts a good spin on it and remember maybe the one second that was great.”

He stopped next at a long red-velvet theater curtain extending almost the length of one wall, and pulled the curtain to reveal: “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot,” only this time “I had to search porn to find pictures of assholes that had no hands, mouths, arms, penises—anything invading its moment in the sun. You can never find them them alone. They’re really rare.” The curtain is there, he explained, “in case your parents are coming over, or the IRS is auditing you.” Somebody asked him which was his favorite. He laughed and walked over to the last photo. “Here’s the dirty foot,” he said triumphantly. Again, he “had to…” Why the dirty foot? “A dirty foot, first of all, is up when you’re having sex, right? But a dirty foot is the one thing you will never find in porn, because they always wipe it off whenever it’s shown. There is someone there whose job is to wipe off the bottom. So, it was really hard to find. It was like Rosebud!”

While poring over the exhibition catalog of the 160 pieces in the BMA show, I consulted my 21-year-old daughter, who knew that “he made movies with his freak friends.” And added, “He doesn’t seem like a Taurus.” Weird somehow that my daughter knows Waters, but my parents, who are his age, 72, do not.

Could Waters have imagined “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot” hanging permanently at the BMA? He said, ”The Baltimore Museum, I could have, because [former BMA curator] Brenda Richardson was the first person here that gave me a full film retrospective before I made Hairspray, before I was safe. People were outraged that city money was being spent. The censor board lady went crazy and everything. So the Baltimore museum was the first artistic institution that ever embraced me. So, yes, if anywhere was going to do it, I could have imagined it here.”

“‘Gay is Not Enough.’ It isn’t. It’s a good start. It helps but I am not a separatist. I think that heterosexuals can be great artists. They can’t be good florists, but they can be great artists. It has some sensibility about being an outsider or being other, no matter what—gay or straight or minority or anything that’s not fitting in with everybody.”

When I look at “Gay is Not Enough,” all I see are the words “Gay Is Not Enough” against a blurry background sending an at best ambiguous message. Again, with my Knowledgeable Friend:

“I don’t know,” he said. “ You have to show it to me.”

As soon as I turned my phone toward the image, he came back with, “It’s the typeface for the title sequence of the film of Jacqueline Susann’s novel Once Is not Enough (terrible, out of control, still got nominated for an Oscar), The blurry background is the water on the frosted glass door where Kirk Douglas is showering.”

I told him what Waters said about gay sensibility not being enough.

“Like he said, it’s not enough. You have to be the most extreme version of whatever you want to be. If you’re fat, you have to be Divine eating a meatball sub. If you’re skinny, you have to be anorexic.”

“What’s John Waters superlative?”

“His delivery. He’s the best person to say it.”

I was very happy walking around living in John Waters’ world for awhile, and I was sad when we reached the final exhibit in John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a room lined with a row of booths, each with a courtesy box of Kleenex. “The very last room are peepshows, which I always liked, but in them are my very first movies I ever made: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. They shouldn’t really be in movie theaters or anything. It’s much better in a peepshow on a loop. They are really ephemera. They were movies I made when I was a kid.”

The tour ends where all of his career began, so for those without much insight into John Waters, understanding where Indecent Exposure is heading really is the beginning. This show reaches back to the filming of 1964’s Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. Intentionally, or not, showing the early films on a loop juxtaposed to explicit peepshow content is as sweetly charming as nickelodeons of the past—almost. His work in the ’60s seeded the visual art he created beginning in the early ’90s. Divine’s eternal return on the screens in the booths pays tender homage to their friendship, and continues as a thread throughout not only Waters’ films, but in his visual art, books, and live appearances.

During our one-on-one conversation, I asked Waters about his kindness and his lifelong friendships, particularly with the actors he dubbed the “Dreamlanders,” the cast of his earliest films. “I’m still friends with the ones that are alive,” he said. “I still see Mink [Stole] and Mary Vivian Pierce. We’re still friends, and to me, that’s the success of living. That you do have friends. That’s what keeps you sane. That’s the only thing that really matters, that you have friends that have lasted for awhile. I don’t trust people who have no long-time friends. I mean, ‘Why?’ That’s the only comfort that you’re going to have, because your parents are going to die, usually before. So basically, I’m saying my friends are very important to have for me, and that’s another reason I live in Baltimore. I have people here. I’m showing movies I made fifty years ago out there, and the sad part is, many of them aren’t here with me. Divine, he’d be much happier if he wasn’t dead. He’d rather be here.”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art

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lorrainecparker · 7 years

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ART OF THE CUT with Eddie Hamilton, ACE on “Kingsman (2)”

This is Art of the Cut’s second interview with Eddie Hamilton, ACE. The first one was about Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Hamilton’s other previous work includes co-editing Kick-Ass with Oscar-winner, Pietro Scalia, ACE, and editing X-Men: First Class among many others.

HULLFISH: So you just finished Kingsman: Golden Circle and, as we record this interview, you are working on the next Mission: Impossible movie. They’re both huge action-based movies. Is there a trick to editing great action?

HAMILTON: The trick to great action is being invested in the outcome of the sequence. It’s caring about the characters and understanding the stakes of what’s involved in the action sequence and what will happen if the protagonist succeeds or fails in their objective. If that’s clear for the audience then you’ll have the basis for a good action sequence. Secondary to that is the inventiveness of the choreography and the way the action is filmed and edited, after that, it’s about great sound design and music.

HULLFISH: I recently did an interview with Elisabet Ronaldsdottir who cut Atomic Blonde and she also brought up the importance of having a good dialogue with the fight and stunt coordinators. What was your interaction like there?

HAMILTON: The one thing about Kingsman: The Golden Circle that is very different from any other film I’ve done is I had twenty weeks of prep before they started filming. So twenty weeks of working with the fight choreographers on their sequences with storyboards and with previs and working on script development with Matthew Vaughn so the prep on all the big action sequences was done before they started filming. The whole opening of the movie is a very exciting, elaborate fight sequence followed by a car chase which was planned out almost shot-for-shot about two months before we started filming because it is so complicated and requires so many different cameras and ways of filming inside the vehicle. They had to make about seven different versions of a London black cab to enable the way that the camera was going to move around. And so that whole sequence was planned out with a combination of stunt visuals filmed on video, pencil storyboards, and clips ripped from other movies to represent the London driving geography shots. Then I added sound effects and music, along with my voice recorded into the Avid reading lines from the script, and all this was carefully edited together to tell the story of the opening of the film.

Taron Egerton stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

That was a lot of work. Several weeks’ work building that sequence so that Matthew could approve it and then we could film it.

Then I worked very closely with the stunt team throughout the shoot. Brad Allan is the fight designer and he has a fantastic team including a previs fight editor named Yung Lee. The team would design and film the fight on a video camera, Yung would edit it and add temporary visual effects and sound effects. Then he would show it to Matthew, and that would be imported by me – sometimes re-edited a little to fit the overall length of the sequence – and then Brad would go away and shoot that on the Alexa camera pretty much shot-for-shot.

For the most part, the credit for the action sequences and the initial editing of them belongs to Brad and Yung, who would send me QuickTimes of the sequences that they’d been working on that had been approved by Matthew.

Then the actors arrive and they are trained for several weeks. They train specifically to do the fight moves beat by beat, so they are prepared and rehearse and they are physically fit and ready to tackle the complexity of the fight sequence. And quite often if it’s a sequence in a room like a bar or the villain’s lair, they will build a stunt set out of cardboard boxes that represents the size of the space that the actual set will be. So the actors get to see physically how far they have to move around. A lot of the gags involving people flipping or flying through the air or involve wires to safely move the actors from A to B and soft sets so the actors and stunt guys don’t hurt themselves.

Poppyland in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

Then when everyone gets to the real set they’re ready to perform all the stunts and film very efficiently and quickly. They’re not making it up on the day. It’s all carefully planned.

The opening sequence in The Golden Circle was about ten days filming. So when you watch the film there is a fight between two characters in a black cab, it took about ten days to film and was very meticulously planned and every single shot was carefully choreographed. It took months and months from the original idea to the final edit. Probably longer than a year.

HULLFISH: Another big thing for me with fight scenes is the geography of where characters are in relationship to each other.

HAMILTON: It’s crucially important, something that we discuss on a daily basis while we’re editing. There’s a specific action sequence which is on a cable car in the Italian Alps. We incorporated these extremely wide shots into the action to clearly show the geography of what the cable car is doing in relation to what’s around it so that you understand quickly and clearly where the characters are and you understand the predicament that they’re in. Matthew is very precise about his use of geography in action to make it super clear for the audience what’s going on. It’s something that we refine over and over to make sure we’ve got it right. In those twenty weeks prep, when we’re building all the action sequences, we’re making sure that we’ve got the geography in there to make it clear.

Channing Tatum in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

HULLFISH: Let’s talk about organizing footage for that 10-minute opening scene. How do you handle a sequence that is 10 minutes long?

HAMILTON: That is a very good question. What happens is that you end up with lots of bins, grouped by slate numbers. So, for one scene, I may have up to 20 bins and it will be named scene 4, and then in brackets, slate four to E and then I’ll have another bin for scene 4, and it will say slates F to H. So I have all the slates broken down like that. And then what I do is I watch through every slate, take the best bits and put them on a timeline, building this massive selects reel of everything in rough story order. And then I slowly, slowly squeeze it down until it’s the very best bits of action. Sometimes I’m literally over-cutting what they shot on video two months earlier and then I’m finding the best take and slotting it over so it’s the very best frames of the action to use for that beat. And then sometimes where I need to add more snap, I’ll snip out one frame or add camera shake or do a dynamic reframing on it or something just to make sure that this tiny little beat of story is absolutely precise.

And then it becomes a case of refining it hundreds of times to make sure that everything flows and your eyes are drawn to the right part of the frame and that the cuts play smoothly. It takes a very, very long time, and there are no shortcuts. It’s a very slow process of mining the footage to find the very best bits of action. The good news is Matthew mostly trusts my choices for action. So ninety-eight percent of what I present to him, he is in agreement that it’s the best. Very occasionally he’ll say, “Can I check that?” And then we will go back over the ten or twelve options. On a macro level, we may come back and look at a sequence after four months or five months of editing and decide it’s about ten seconds too long.

I hope that we’ve built a rollercoaster that has the right amount of excitement, character, humor and breathing space so there are proper peaks and troughs. After a year of working on every frame of the film with love, care, and sweat, I really hope that the audience feels like they’ve been taken through an exciting journey.

HULLFISH: One of the things I noticed in the first film was that many of the action shots were bespoke shots with very specific camera/action choreography. It wasn’t shot with your typical kind of coverage.

HAMILTON: That’s absolutely correct. It’s how Matthew Vaughn likes to shoot action. He works very closely with his action designer Brad Allan. He started working with him on Kick-Ass. They also collaborated on Kingsman: The Secret Service and this movie. That Hong Kong style of action is something that Matthew really embraces. He doesn’t like to shoot coverage for fights. He likes to plan fights, plan action, make sure that nothing is left to chance. That way the shooting days can be used constructively and precisely, so not a moment is wasted.

Some of the beats in the fight require very specific camera rigs that are hired just for one shot and it may take six hours to get ten takes, but it makes for an extraordinarily memorable moment. I am a collaborator with Brad and with Yung, his editor. I certainly share the credit for the sequences with them. I’m not taking full credit for any of this stuff. The choice of shots and how the shots slide together for this action is initially designed by them and then refined by me later over the course of a year based on how the sequence needs to play with the rest of the film, and how I can make the actual shot the best it can be – so that every single frame that is in the film is the best frame that’s available. It’s a team effort for the action sequences. The action sequences make up maybe twenty-five minutes of the film overall, but the film is two hours and fifteen minutes or whatever, so there’s an awful lot of drama and other kinds of editing which is necessary to make the film work. But certainly, for the action, I need wholeheartedly to give most of the credit to Brad and Yung and the rest of that team.

HULLFISH; With fight and action sequences that heavily choreographed and perfected, it must then be very difficult to edit when pieces of the fight or chase have to come out of the film.

HAMILTON: Yes it is. There are several ways of doing it. You can intercut it. So you’ll notice there are a couple of the scenes in the film that are intercut with parallel action. Where one character is doing one thing and another character is doing another thing we can choose when to cut back and forth. As a result of that, we can choose to ellipse out a small section of the action. The other thing is that quite often if the characters are exchanging blows you can just snip out three or four punches and it’s the same story. You just don’t have quite so much back and forth. There are also ways that you can try and hide cuts in muzzle flashes in the way that the camera moves to try and make you feel something more organic. So you don’t really sense that something’s missing, it just kind of feels natural. We use all those kinds of tricks to get the action down so that it feels the correct length for that specific moment in the film.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk a bit about the character and performance and dramatic moments. Is your approach to those scenes the same as your approach to action, or different?

HAMILTON: This is my current favorite method, which has evolved over the years… The first thing I do is watch a wide shot. I ignore the script because the script is a working document which is often revised on set, you can only work with what’s been shot. I watch a wide shot and get a sense of the story of the scene (which may be different to what’s on the page).

Jeff Bridges stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

Then very quickly I will throw the scene together without refining the edits too much. I work with all the production audio tracks on the timeline. Normally it’s one or two mix tracks and all the iso tracks. Then I will watch all the dailies, usually in shooting order, although sometimes I’ll work backward to take one. I watch on the 65” OLED TV in my room. On this movie, I made the transition to standing while I edit and now I enjoy standing all day. Watching dailies is a time where I can stretch and move, and allow my body to change posture.

Then I duplicate my rough edit, and as I’m watching, I will find juicy sections and start slugging clips into a timeline using a different video layer for each set-up. By the end of my dailies review, I have a massive selects reel of memorable pieces of action and moments that an actor did something interesting or quirky or particularly relevant to their character. That’s very time-consuming.

Sometimes it will take me only ten minutes to do a first rough cut, but four or five hours to go through all the dailies, and another two hours to refine those massive selects reels back into an edited sequence. But I know that I have been through every frame and I’ve got what I consider to be the greatest hits of the performance on a single timeline. Then I can enjoy the process of refining the scene knowing that I’ve got all the best little looks and great ad-libs and line deliveries along with beautiful moments of character performance. I’ve been through all the gags and different line readings so I can figure out a way to make certain lines bounce off each other.

Channing Tatum stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

Then I’ll leave the scene for a day. I’ll go home and won’t watch what I’ve done. Next morning when I come in, I’ll watch the timeline silent and feel the rhythm of the scene. Then I’ll turn the mix track on and listen to the audio edits which are all over the place. Then I’ll duplicate the sequence, tweak it as necessary based on my fresh perspective, then spend a couple of hours doing a very precise and careful dialogue edit so that the dialogue track is beautifully smooth. Then I’ll put in sound effects and music.

Matthew Vaughn is a director who loves listening to temp score when reviewing scenes. So certainly when I’m starting to work I’ll play around with music, although I don’t let the music distract me. It’s really icing on the cake. And then I’m ready to present the scene to him. Often he would surprise me by walking in the day after filming, occasionally he would bring actors off the set, and he’ll go, “Hey Eddie. Do you have a sketch or an assembly of that scene? Let’s watch it with the guys.”

So sometimes I would have the privilege of showing an assembly of a sequence to the actors who had filmed it a couple of days before. He’s fairly confident that the scenes are working, otherwise he wouldn’t show them. He would give me a few notes and I would refine.

One big challenge we had on The Golden Circle was our first assembly was probably three hours fifty minutes of good scenes, which were eventually streamlined down to the two hours fifteen running time. That took months and months but was rewarding because we really did end up with the very best stuff.

DF-06453_r – Halle Berry stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

HULLFISH: I’m fascinated by the fact that you said, “My current method.” This is one of the things I’ve been pointing out from writing the Art of the Cut book. Your methods should probably change. As you read about the way other editors work or you are presented with new ideas from maybe an assistant editor or even a new feature in the Avid software, your methods should be flexible – even just flexible to deal with novel situations, right?

HAMILTON: I’m constantly refining how I utilize the non-linear tools I have. One of the things that I love to do with the power of digital editing is find material very quickly. So when I’m with the director we can make progress on refining the edit very efficiently. I have many selects reels which contain the greatest hits for each scene. So if the director says, “What are the other moments that you picked?” I can call them up and run them immediately without hunting around.

The other thing that I do – which I’ve done for a few movies now – is to have the assistants make a massive line string reel so we can always go back and audition all the line readings extremely efficiently. I can go through and show we’ve got these wides, mediums, overs, and close-ups. And the director can choose to say, “Just run me the close-ups.”

When you’re working on a big budget movie, you have to make fast progress on the edit very efficiently, because the director’s time is limited… they may be shooting the next day, they may be prepping, they may be working with visual effects or music. Digital editing tools really help with that. And then I’m constantly refining how I lay out my Avid timeline so it’s efficient for my team to turn over dialogue and sound and visual effects so that everything is quick to find and it’s easy for everyone to see their way around.

DF-21294_R – Julianne Moore as Poppy in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

I always ask my team if they discover a better way of doing something because I want to learn new tricks. I read your AOTC interviews every week to see if I can improve the way I work. I’m constantly trying to refine my techniques and get better. I strive to do my very best work every single day. It’s what gives me satisfaction on the job but also it’s an investment in my skills so that I’m hired again on another movie.

HULLFISH: That answered one of my other questions, which was about making selects reels not just for you as the editor, but also when it comes to handling notes and requests from the director.

HAMILTON: It’s important for action as well. When I’m over-cutting the stunt reels I’m still banking three or four options for each piece of action, just in case I think that another take was better for this beat. One of the car chases was not choreographed as heavily, and they would film sections with seven cameras, so I would have plenty of options. Then I would build a selects reel of those seven cameras and perhaps three of the cameras weren’t good for that tiny piece of action, but four of the cameras were great. Then I figure out we’re going to need a close-up of Eggsy to put it there for his point of view, and a shot of the speedometer, and a cutaway of guns firing and a reflection in a mirror. So a lot of the actual car chase was something where I did build it from scratch.

HULLFISH: Another thing you mentioned is editing while standing, which is something I’ve been doing for about eight or nine years now and I really love it for many reasons.

HAMILTON: It was a challenge to force myself to do it because I found out that I was very used to “getting in the zone” sitting down. Quite often when I started off I would stand up to watch dailies and to do a selects reel, but then, to get to the serious business of cutting the scene, I would find that naturally, I would want to sit down and get lost in the edit.

I listen to Zack Arnold’s Fitness in Post podcast which is now renamed Optimize Yourself.

HULLFISH: That’s a great podcast. I’ve been a guest on it myself and we talked about editing standing up.

Taron Egerton stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

HAMILTON: I listen to every episode of his podcast and I found myself thinking, “I’ve got to try this. It has to be for the best.” I value my physical fitness, I value my health, I value what I put into my body. I used to drink quite a lot of Coke Zero, Diet Coke and stuff like that. All I drink now is water and cups of tea -mostly decaffeinated tea.

When you stand up all day your body feels like it’s had a bit of a work out because you’re moving. And if I do sit down, after about half an hour I get itchy to stand up again. I find now that hours can fly by. I feel energized throughout the whole day and you don’t feel sleepy when you’re standing up. I feel more alert, I feel more creative, I feel more engaged with the creativity somehow.

I know I’m really late to the party with this. Walter Murch started standing years ago. But I’m very glad I caught on now. I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve hopefully got another 20 or 30 or maybe 40 years editing left in me. So I would recommend it to anybody. Recently I got one of those Topo ergonomic mats. (https://www.amazon.com/Ergodriven-Not-Flat-Anti-Fatigue-Calculated-Must-Have/dp/B00V3TO9EK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504816738&sr=8-1&keywords=ergo+mat+for+standing) As a result I constantly adjust my position throughout the day. They’re not cheap, but it’s something you use all day, every day. So it’s one of the best investments you could make. All my assistants are slowly transitioning to standing, I’ll be getting them a Topo Mat for Christmas.

HULLFISH: I got that Topo Mat too after Zach mentioned it on his podcast. It really helps with the foot and knee fatigue… better than standing on concrete, that’s for sure. One of the other things with standing is that I find, when I’m cutting an action sequence, I’m breathing fast. I’m really part of the scene and when you’re standing you just get to be part of the energy of the scene.

HAMILTON: Yeah you’re right. I watch these scenes over a thousand times, because I’m really trying to inhabit the mind space of the audience – where my soul is soaring with excitement, where I want the music to hit a triumphant peak or where I want the audience to punch the air and be speechless with amazement and wonder at what they’re seeing on the screen. You’re allowed to get into it more when you’re standing up.

DF-28050_r – Taron Egerton stars in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

Slowly I see the sequence coming together and I feel there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I start to get a glimpse of what the end product might be. It’s so exciting and rewarding to be the conductor of that. As the editor, you have control over every single thing that the audience sees and hears. The director then comes in and refines it with you, but that initial symphony is created entirely by you choosing the shots, choosing the sound effects, choosing the music, or working with a music editor to refine the music. And then slowly when you see it coming together it’s incredibly rewarding. The film goes through so many hundreds of iterations before landing on the final edit that people see. And obviously, if the audience gets into it and enjoys it then you’ve done your job. Everyone who’s reading this will likely be nodding. We’re invisible artists.

HULLFISH: You mentioned ad-libbing. Was there a lot of that and how did you deal with incorporating it?

HAMILTON: I watch all the dailies and I start to get a sense of what lines might play opposite other lines. I can hear Matthew directing the actors and saying, “try this, try this, try this, how about this, say this.” But quite often something rises to the surface. I’ve worked with Matthew since 2001 so we have a lot of years of experience and hopefully, I’ll reach a good working edit of a sequence fairly quickly, based on what I feel he will like and what will work best for the scene. I think it’s very important as an editor to have a point of view and to present something so you can say, “Here is a version of the scene that I think works for the movie,” and to be able to articulate why you’ve made every cutting choice or why every shot has earned its place in the scene. But often Matthew will have notes or we may re-cut the scene from scratch because something was fundamentally wrong with how the scene flowed in the context of the rest of the movie. There are several scenes in Kingsman where we tried many different versions.

A couple of times we did go round and round in circles and but not many. I would say to him, “These are the other options that you have here.” Sometimes we would try a different punchline and actually end up back where we started because there was something about that first gut instinct to the comic timing that did land best.

Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, and Pedro Pascal star in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

For one gag in the film, which probably gets the biggest laugh, Matthew had a great idea for a different punchline. We got the actors back, filmed the line, but I ended up doing a split screen with one of the actor’s reactions from the first take and the second actor’s performance from the reshoot. The combination of the two was the best result. I felt it when I was going through the dailies. I mocked it up on the timeline, we did the visual effects to combine the shots properly, and it gets a huge laugh. That’s very rewarding, but that’s an example of how we use the Avid tricks which we did not have years ago when we were cutting workprint. Now, we use split screens extensively to bring out the best in the material. We’re all working on that playing field of split screens and mattes and re-speeding clips to make the timing of the scene work better.

HULLFISH: To jump back a-ways in the interview, you mentioned that you are always pulling all of the iso audio tracks with you as you edit. Did I hear that correctly? That’s a fairly unusual way to work, I think.

HAMILTON: Yes that’s right, I always use all the iso audio tracks when cutting a scene. I never use the production mix track ever when I present the scene to the director. I go through and I pick the best boom mic and if necessary the best radio mic to play alongside the boom and then I carefully keyframe the audio so that the dialogue is as clean as it can possibly be based on the tools that I have. An actor’s performance is sacred and you should be giving it the best chance of succeeding in the edit, and in my opinion, this means never using the production mix track – which may have other bits of radio mic or off-mic sound mixed in.

Channing Tatum and Halle Berry in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

The production sound mixer can’t do a perfect job moment by moment on the set. So I feel that for me to do the very best job I can – which will ripple down the entire post-production of the movie until we get to a dubbing stage – doing a really precise, clean, beautiful dialogue edit is best practice.

I spend almost as much time on that as I do on the fine cut. My cutting room is calibrated to 85dB. However, I don’t monitor at 85dB, I monitor at around 75 because 85 in a small cutting room is deafeningly loud. But I have the room calibrated correctly so that when I am sound mixing, my dialogue edit it will play smoothly and sound theatrical. Then the sound effects and music are mixed relative to that. So the iso tracks are all there but as soon as I do the dialogue edit with my chosen tracks, the rest are discarded. I can always match frame back if I want to double-check a radio mic or something later. I’m pretty precise about that first dialogue edit and then if I refine the scene I will use the same boom and the same radio mic if I swap out a take.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk a little about temp score.

HAMILTON: We used a lot from the first Kingsman which is great because all that musical DNA was there. The composers – Matt Margeson and Henry Jackman – built on that extensively. But we had to find two new musical identities – one for the villain (Julianne Moore’s character Poppy) and another for Statesman (the American cousins of Kingsman). They have a hoedown bluegrass country western feel with amazing fiddles and guitars and all kinds of terrific country textures which make their action sequences enormous fun to watch. For Julianne Moore’s character Poppy, we explored a lot of different ideas before ending up with the one that’s in the film now. Matthew loves making sure that the themes are carried through the film so that they become a part of the texture of the storytelling along with every other tool at his disposal as a director.

HULLFISH: You described the final scored music beautifully, but I’m sure that trying to get to something like that with temp score was not easy.

HAMILTON: Very complicated. We really struggled to temp Statesman. We went back through classic Western scores. To be honest we never found anything that was close to what Matthew wanted and we ended up using the stuff that the composers wrote for Statesman. And for Julianne Moore, we started out with a 50s sitcom idea that didn’t really stick. We tried some score from Tangerine Dream with that dark John Carpenter vibe. Matthew was worried it sounded too similar to the Valentine theme from the last film that was synth-based. We tried tracks from Serial Mom and Gremlins 2. But we never really got a texture with the temp score that we were happy with. It was very difficult. Poppy’s musical identity… we couldn’t find it with temp score and it’s something that we worked on for months before we settled on what Matthew felt was right.

For the big street battle in Poppyland, Matthew always wanted “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” by Elton John, but the studio recording doesn’t have a massive rock and roll ending, so I dug around and found two live versions from the late 70s, one from Wembley and the other from the Royal Festival Hall I think, I used a combination of the guitar solos and drums from both to create the big finale you hear in the movie as the battle builds to a climax.

HULLFISH: Another thing you discussed was that your comedy stuff didn’t go through a lot of revisions, where the action stuff or drama stuff did. It’s interesting that the initial take of what’s funny is often the thing that sticks best. Not always, but often.

L-r, Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Elton John, star in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.”

HAMILTON: Kingsman is full of light-hearted entertaining moments. One of the scenes that I’m most proud of, which was the hardest to do, is a sequence where Eggsy is having dinner with his girlfriend’s parents and he is meeting them for the first time. They ask him some very difficult questions and he finds a clever way of answering them. It was a scene which had classic dinner party coverage of eye-lines with multiple shots and sizes. Wides, mediums, tights, overs, every single line to every eyeline in sequence. So you end up with an enormous amount of footage which any editor who has done one of these scenes will know is an enormous jigsaw puzzle of reactions and lines and moments and tiny little beats to make the conversation feel like it’s flowing and keeping all the characters alive.

That sequence took me a very long time. Maybe ten days of solid editing to build a first assembly. I had this idea for a waltz playing over it and I found this piece of music that seemed to fit. This was going to flow like a dance. I presented it to Matthew with all these interesting transitions that I built with these close-ups of food courses being swapped over. You’ll see there are close-ups of posh plates being put down with fast dissolves, fun stuff like that which is part of the wish fulfillment of these films.

I remember when I watched James Bond movies growing up I would see Roger Moore and Sean Connery visiting these far-flung locations. In Octopussy they went to India and they filmed in these incredibly exotic locations which you would never dream of visiting. As a result, I would experience spy wish fulfillment. I would see Roger Moore on this exotic beach or in this exotic mountain hideaway. A lot of the Kingsman vibe is based around that sense of fun the Roger Moore Bond movies had and that sense of wish fulfillment was always an essential ingredient in Bond movie.

In Kingsman you’re going to a royal palace to enjoy a dinner with the king and queen of Sweden. And you’re seeing the finery and the splendor and the delicious food and the wine and crockery and cutlery. Anyway, all those things were going through my head as I was building the sequence and I presented it to Matthew and he said, “That’s great. I don’t think we need to change that.” So the scene stayed that way from the first assembly all the way through to the final edit. What you see in the film is how I landed at the end of a very thorough process of trying to maximize the best in what they shot out of the mountains of coverage.

HULLFISH: You mentioned that the first assembly came in at over three hours. Tell me a little bit about the difficult decisions and the answers to solutions of cutting out more than an hour of a film.

HAMILTON: It comes down to removing information that the audience doesn’t need. Sometimes that they can fill in themselves; it��s superfluous to the core story that you’re telling; sometimes it’s to increase the mystery around a certain piece of story; quite a lot of the time it was to reduce characters traveling, so that we would set them up as going somewhere and then just find them in that location without necessarily showing how they travelled there.

We worked on transitions in this film probably harder than any movie I’ve worked on before. Every single transition in this film (where we’re changing from one story to another) was refined many times over months of editing.

Our little scene cards which were up on a whiteboard were shuffled around many times while we tried to balance Eggsy’s story with Poppy’s story with the Statesman story to make sure that we stayed with each character as long as we needed to invest in them before we moved on to another story. And quite often we ended up staying longer than we initially thought because ironically the film felt slower when these bits of story were in shorter sections. The audience likes spending time with a character and going on that journey with them before you switch over. That was one thing that we played with a lot… how long you spend with each character and if you can ellipse out bits of story so that the audience fills in the blanks, and if you can make the transitions organic and interesting so you never feel like the channel is being changed too abruptly as you watch. Your emotions are being guided and the stakes of the story are clear and the mystery of the villain’s plot is building in a tantalizing and mysterious way so that you’re never confused but you’re always intrigued. It’s all those ingredients which you refine and refine and refine.

And the other thing that we did was test screen. We listened to notes from the studio. We invited key collaborators into the process. I would invite editing friends of mine quite late in the process because I was so close to the film and I needed fresh perspectives. I wanted to hear their honest, brutally harsh but necessary criticism, so that we could take a long hard look at the movie and make healthy decisions to get the running time down, so the film didn’t outstay its welcome. But mostly it was listening carefully to the audience every step of the way. I think we did three large screenings to several hundred people. In between we did multiple friends and family screenings to 10, 15, sometimes 30 people. So once or twice a month through the entire editing process we would screen the film to really nail down the details of what was and wasn’t working and check where the laughs were coming.

Throughout, we were careful to keep the grace notes of the story. That’s what makes the audience engage. It’s the little character moments which make you fall in love and care deeply about our heroes so that you’re invested from beginning to end, and I hope it works. You never know how the film will be received. There’s a lot of factors you don’t have control over but we know that we made the very best film that we could for the audience and we hope they respond positively towards it. It’s predominantly about reminding the audience that going to the movies can be fun.

HULLFISH: That’s definitely how I felt about the last Kingsman movie.

HAMILTON: And hopefully you’ll feel the same way about this one. We really worked hard to create something that has that very unique original feeling which is directly from Matthew Vaughn’s imagination onto the screen.

HULLFISH: Eddie, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you again. We’ll have to touch base again when Mission: Impossible Six comes out. And thanks for the great picture of the team with my book!

Here’s an exclusive photo of the editorial team holding your treasured manuscript… From left to right: Christopher Frith (Second Assistant), Riccardo Bacigalupo (First Assistant), Robbie Gibbon (Assistant VFX Editor), Tom Coope (First Assistant), Ryan Axe (Editorial Trainee), Ben Mills (VFX Editor), Eddie Hamilton A.C.E. (Film Editor) Photo taken by Hannah Leckey.

HAMILTON: A pleasure Steve, a big shout out to my trusty editorial team without whom the entire process would’ve ground to a halt very quickly… Riccardo Bacigalupo and Tom Coope (First Assistants), Ben Mills and Robbie Gibbon (VFX Editor and Assistant), Christopher Frith (Second Assistant) and Ryan Axe (Trainee). And thank you, Steve, for taking the time to reach out to the editing community and allow us to share our cutting room stories on your site. Enjoy the movie everybody.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 Art of the Cut interviews have been curated into a book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV editors.” The book is not merely a collection of interviews but was edited into topics that read like a massive, virtual roundtable discussion of some of the most important topics to editors everywhere: storytelling, pacing, rhythm, collaboration with directors, approach to a scene and more. CinemaEditor magazine said of the book, “Hullfish has interviewed over 50 editors around the country and asked questions that only an editor would know to ask. Their answers are the basis of this book and it’s not just a collection of interviews…. It is to his credit that Hullfish has created an editing manual similar to the camera manual that ASC has published for many years and can be found in almost any back pocket of members of the camera crew. It is an essential tool on the set. Art of the Cut may indeed be the essential tool for the cutting room. Here is a reference where you can immediately see how our contemporaries deal with the complexities of editing a film. In a very organized manner, he guides the reader through approaching the scene, pacing, and rhythm, structure, storytelling, performance, sound design, and music….Hullfish’s book is an awesome piece of text editing itself. The results make me recommend it to all. I am placing this book on my shelf of editing books and I urge others to do the same. –Jack Tucker, ACE

The post ART OF THE CUT with Eddie Hamilton, ACE on “Kingsman (2)” appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

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signshoperonline · 7 years

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CIVIQ’s Gleeson On Progress Of LinkNYC Smart City Efforts

Here is the first of a two-part Q&A session with digital signage veteran Brad Gleeson, now the Chief Commercial Officer at CIVIQ, on that company’s smart cities efforts in New York and beyond.

The completed Q&A was provided to 16:9 by a Samsung agency, but they’re the sorts of questions I’d ask. I thought about it, and concluded the Q&A content passed my sniff test on editorial versus advertorial.

LinkNYC is obviously a massive undertaking. Converting payphones and spreading out technology across an entire city is no easy task. How did CIVIQ approach this?

Brad Gleeson

As you can imagine, a project of this kind in one of the world’s largest and busiest cities is a real challenge and we’re not alone in that project. The project itself is owned and managed by a consortium of companies, of which CIVIQ is one of the partners. The other partners are Intersection and Qualcomm. Together, we have resources who work together as a team to manage the deployment and operation of the network.

In addition to that we have third-party contractors and service providers that we’ve each hired that are specialists in the engineering work and the construction work and the service and maintenance functions that we require to maintain such a large network.

The planning is done in cooperation with representatives from the city and various agencies and we basically have a team of people who are constantly reviewing the location, making sure that where we’re putting the structures are the best places we can locate them at and what we can do to become as efficient as possible.

In the deployment process, we’re approaching the 1,000th unit, I don’t think we’re quite there yet but we have 7,000 more to go. So it’s going to be a long-term, probably three to four year process to get them all deployed. We’re getting better at it as we go, I would say.

Obviously New York can see extreme weather throughout the year with snow storms, hurricanes, and very hot summers. What technical preparations were made to ensure the Link machines will survive their environment?

I would say that probably our primary value-add to the project is the legacy and history that the company has.

Originally, CIVIQ was a spin out of a company called Comark and Comark manufactures ruggedized display and computer equipment to go on battleships and that are used in extreme industrial applications. So we have some history of how to manufacture devices that needed to be able to withstand the elements as well as extreme temperatures and difficult environments.

So these devices are engineered to basically survive being exposed to the elements and to the public for more than 10 years.

The engineering that goes into that means that all the components need to be very heavily tested and manufactured and the whole unit needs to be completely sealed against the environment. We have a patented cooling system and other technologies that we use to reduce the amount of internal heat that the devices have to withstand and then to keep moisture out of the devices.

So yes, it’s a big challenge and one that I would say only a handful of companies in the world could take on at this scale. It’s really the basis for CIVIQ’s capabilities within the project.

In a similar vein, New York is home to a huge amount of diverse people. Were there any considerations made around accessibility?

Absolutely. The idea was we had to make these devices replace public payphone booths which also had been designed for accessibility for the handicapped. There’s a regulation in the United States called the Americans with Disabilities Act which lays out very clearly what sort of requirements there are for public devices that could be accessed by the disabled.

So yes, we have Braille information on the displays, the tablets themselves are placed in a location that makes them accessible to people in wheelchairs, we’re currently installing hearing loops which are for the hearing impaired on the devices as well.

So yes, absolutely. The idea was to make the devices accessible to all and useful to all and we’ve gone to great lengths to make that happen.

What benefits do you see these machines bringing to the people of New York?

A big justification for the network that was created by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then Mayor Bill de Blasio was what they call ‘closing the digital divide’. There was roughly 30% of the population of New York that did not have regular access to broadband internet.

In many cases students whose homework was posted on the internet had to go to McDonald’s or Starbucks or someplace away from home in order to see their homework. People who needed to use the internet to search for a job or to find a doctor or whatever had a difficult time getting access to information that most of us take for granted.

So a big change to this community is just reliable access to the benefits of the World Wide Web and the internet technology that most of us, like I say, take for granted.

Other than that, the other part of it was really a creation of a neighborhood touch point which could be used to provide a wide range of access and information to people in the area. So the use of the wayfinding to help people find their way, not just to a restaurant or a movie or something like that but to get access to transit applications, to mass transit so that they could reduce the cost of their commute or could manage to get to places more cost effectively.

And also very importantly, the City 311 app which New York is invested heavily in to engage citizens and information that the city needs to share as well as to get information back from citizens issues that are important to them, I think has been a tremendous benefit.

So we’re still exploring all the ways that the device can help the city and its residents. We’re investigating new applications, new use cases and in the case of CIVIQ’s expansion of the concept into other cities, we’re actively engaged with a wide range of other cities on how they would like us to use this sort of urban technology to solve or help problems that each of those cities have which are unique to them.

For any city, security and safety are important issues. In the case of a sudden emergency, natural or otherwise, how will the Link machines perform and are there features that will make them useful in these situations?

Yes, absolutely. All of the devices have battery backup and they have large, bright, Samsung LCD screens that can be used to alert the public to an emergency event and instruct them as to how to prepare for that or to get help.

They also have 911 buttons and so they’re immediately connected to first responders in the case of a localized emergency. And the battery backup maintains the function of at least the Wi-Fi, but other functionality can also be enabled for some period of time after the power is out to extend this functionality in the case of an emergency.

You mention the use of cameras and not taking personal information. I think that segues well into the aspect of cyber security. What preparations have been made to defend the Link machines from hackers and other security issues?

We worked hard on first of all a privacy policy, which we believe is among the most advanced in the world at this point. So we’re very, very, I think, aware of the importance of maintaining the privacy of our users and the people utilizing the network.

So first of all our Wi-Fi network offers two versions; an open version and a secure version. The secure version is encrypted end to end and utilizes token technology to make sure that all users’ information and data is very securely protected.

None of the data that we collect and utilize is made available to the public. It’s very carefully managed and used specifically just for measuring the effectiveness and utilization and capabilities of the network and the system itself.

The advertising displays and all the information that goes across the systems is on our own private network which is, again, very secure and managed internally by our team.

So I would say we’ve taken extraordinary steps to ensure the security and privacy of the network. Nothing is 100% foolproof, as you’ve seen from all the different ways that various groups have had their security breached, but I would say we’ve done everything possible in the current state of the art to make sure that we’ve protected the data and privacy and security of the information that our users are entrusting us with.

Tomorrow – Monetizing the network

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russellthornton · 8 years

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Losing Interest in Your Boyfriend? Signs You Should Never Ignore

Does your relationship seem to be more wane than wax lately? Have sparks fizzled? Here are all the signs you’re losing interest in your boyfriend, and fast.

Relationships can be filled with all your attention, or they make you feel exhausted and bored, leading you to focus your attention on other things. If you are uncertain if you’re still into him, these eight signs show if you are losing interest in your boyfriend.

When you first start dating, you are super excited about them and every little second of their lives. You want to be with each other all the time, and you probably find yourself texting each other or calling to check in whenever you get a free moment.

When you’ve been dating each other for a little while, you might find yourself caring a little less about what they are doing. You stop texting about their work day, what they had for lunch, and the other little details you used to agonize over. When you’ve reached this point, it’s important to ask yourself if you are still into your relationship, or if you’re losing interest. [Read: 15 reasons why you’re getting bored with your relationship]

Going… going… gone – How to tell if you’re losing interest in your boyfriend

The signs below tell you if it’s just your ADD kicking in and causing you to not be so focused on your beau, or if it’s actually your subconscious trying to tell you you’re just over it.

#1 You no longer crave them as much sexually. If in the beginning of your relationship, you had passionate hook-up sessions and honestly swore to all your friends that he was and is the best sex you’ve ever had, but now you no longer even care to find out if that is true or not, then it’s safe to say you are definitely not as into him as you were.

When you really want to be with your man, and you are really into him, then trust me when I say you also really want to keep the passion going—because you crave it. You want to create the special connection you get when your sex is on fire! [Read: Fun sex games to play with your boyfriend and keep sex exciting]

#2 You don’t pay attention when they talk. Another way to tell you’re no longer into your relationship is by how you make them feel when you have conversations with each other. For example, if you used to have energy-filled conversations, constantly inquiring about each other’s day, but you no longer really care how his work day went, it’s safe to say you’re losing interest.

If you find yourself daydreaming about other things, and paying more attention to the TV left on in the background when he tells you things about his day, then you aren’t nearly as interested in him as you once were.

#3 You don’t text or check in as often. When you are in a relationship with a guy you really love and care about, especially in the beginning, it’s a sure bet you text and call each other as often as possible. When you’re in a relationship you want to be in, you stay tuned in to each other at all times.

If you no longer check in, and you don’t send him selfies during the day because you want to remind him how beautiful you are, then you really don’t care about the relationship the way you once did. [Read: How to save your relationship: 16 practical ways to make it]

#4 You never want to do anything. If you find yourself always saying no to the things you used to say yes to, it’s a sign you might not be as interested in your relationship. If you no longer care to do things with him—for example, go to the movies, take a road trip, or just go out with some friends—then you are probably stuck in a relationship rut.

#5 You start texting other guys. This huge red flag shows you no longer care for your man. If you find yourself scrolling through your Rolodex, looking for those guys that used to wait in the wings, and text them to see what they are up to.

You no longer seek just your current boyfriend’s attention. If you need attention from other guys, you have, without a doubt, lost interest in your relationship. [Read: 10 common reasons why girls with boyfriends flirt with other guys]

#6 You find yourself with a wandering eye. It’s fine to think Brad Pitt or some supermodel is sexy *from far away*. And it’s okay if you and your boyfriend both know who your celebrity crush is. But that’s as far as it should go. You shouldn’t start pursuing these crushes in real life.

If you find yourself looking at every semi-attractive guy that walks past you, and you really don’t care if your boyfriend knows or not, then it’s safe to say you are not focused on just him. Your curiosity is getting the best of you. [Read: Am I cheating? 8 signs you’re accidentally doing it]

#7 Suddenly, you get annoyed with them easily. Just like your frenemy, whose every little photo or status post annoys you, you develop an irritation toward your relationship. It could be something as simple as eating a sandwich “too loudly.”

If you start screening their calls, and hit “ignore” every time they call you, because you think its annoying, then it’s time for you to have a serious conversation. Ask yourself if you are wasting both your time. If everything they do starts to annoy you, it won’t get better… it’ll only get worse. [Read: 16 clear signs you need to break up with boyfriend right away]

#8 You never want to spoil them. When you love someone and want to be with them, you take care of them. You want to much more than you need to. You find yourself asking what they might want for dinner over what you want, or you find yourself shopping for them instead of looking for yourself. [Read: How to make your guy realize he’s losing you – 13 hints that work]

But if you don’t care enough to take the time to cook them their favorite meal, surprise them with new lingerie, or get them some new shirts, these are all signs of you no longer being as into the relationship as you once were. When you really like someone and want to be with them, you want them to know that—all the time, anytime.

[Read: 22 big, early warning signs of a bad boyfriend]

Although losing interest in your relationship doesn’t always spell doom, it should give you pause and make you question if your current relationship is really what you want. It is up to you to decide if you want to revive it… or let it go.

The post Losing Interest in Your Boyfriend? Signs You Should Never Ignore is the original content of LovePanky - Your Guide to Better Love and Relationships.

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recentnews18-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art/

John Waters Takes Us on a Funny, Filthy Tour of His Fine Art

The aphorisms flowed: “The only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity.” And his timing was perfect: “I hate celebrity, too.”

There is an urgency to his photographic art—maybe to everything he does—implied in the phrase that continued to crop up: “I had to…”

So when I got home, I called my friend for help. As soon as I showed him “Grim Reaper” and mentioned another Bergman-influenced sequence, “Puking in Cinema,” the floodgates opened.

When I look at “Gay is Not Enough,” all I see are the words “Gay Is Not Enough” against a blurry background sending an at best ambiguous message. Again, with my Knowledgeable Friend:

“I don’t know,” he said. “ You have to show it to me.”

I told him what Waters said about gay sensibility not being enough.

“What’s John Waters superlative?”

“His delivery. He’s the best person to say it.”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art

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