The Book or The Movie

I am currently reading Life of Pi. Having seen the movie and the vivid images it contained, only the strong recommendation of a friend now brings me to the book.

Two very different media. Strange bedfellows. My copy of Life of Pi bears a still from the movie on the cover and the words "Now A Major Motion Picture". People who have experienced neither book nor movie better get cracking here it seems to imply.

The usual progression is book to movie. We'll ignore those sad novels that are written from a script, following a movie or television show.

So which is better, the book or the movie? Since one is a spoiler for the other, which should it be? Is there a strategy for choosing which to experience first? Should I be scanning the news of upcoming films to see if I need to get in a book quickly?

A great book is no endorsement of the movie. One of my favourite novels is The Magus by John Fowles. Woody Allen once quipped that the only regret he had in life was going to see the film of The Magus.

I have always loved Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. At some point I read the source material, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, published in 1844 by William Makepeace Thackery. The disparity between book and movie is huge, but both creators achieve something unique. Kubrick gives us a straight rendering of the story, with only an unknown narrator joining in from time to time, all his words taken from Thackeray. And so Kubrick's skill as a film maker sweeps us along in the story. The final scene, two and a half minutes long, has four people around a table and although not a word is said the drama is
intense. Only a master could do this. Thackeray on the other hand has the main character tell the
story, and we quickly see two realities, his subjective rationalizations and biased views, versus the negative reactions of those around him to his raving egotism, which he continually misreads. This is the sort of social satire Thackeray was famous for, and that Kubrick has decided to not attempt in his film. The two men have largely created two different Barry Lyndons.

Books leave so much to the imagination, can interweave the exterior and interior worlds, handle great subtleties, use the poetry of words, say so much more in 350 pages than a film in ninety minutes, or even three hours. In a movie the characters are separate from us, there on the screen. In a book we are often aware of their thoughts and emotions and perhaps able to see them as ourselves.

Movies present us with ravishing images, can be wonderful blends of sounds or music. The sheer visual drama of a movie can be breathtaking, it's hard to imagine a writer doing equal justice to the Sun's Anvil sequence of David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia. But perhaps someone could describe it, that immense space of heat, dryness, blinding light and flat nothingness.

I love both books and film but prefer books. That someone made a movie of a boy and a tiger adrift in a lifeboat on the Pacific, and managed to create so much visual interest, is impressive. But I'm finding the book richer, my identification with Pi more meaningful. Nevertheless some images from the film haunt me, in particular the liquid eyes of the adult Pi, the actor Irrfan Khan.

 

The Style of Film Director Terrence Malick

Scene from The Tree of Life, 2011

This week I have watched all six of Terrence Malick's films, including for the first time, his first two. 

Directors like Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick have made great films, and yet have never stuck to one style of filmmaking that is recognizably theirs. Their ability to change the tools of filmmaking to match each film is perhaps part of their greatness. Other directors like Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam or Terrence Malik tend to stick to a style that is uniquely theirs. Whether you like their films or not is often a result of liking their style.

So what does happen in a Malick film? What are the components of his style?

IMPROVISATIONAL ACTING

Although some films require more scripted dialogue than others, Malick, especially in later films, is known to show up every morning with ideas about the days scene, and then ask the actors to help him direct. This is aided by using the one-man mobile Steadicam and a small crew. With many moviemakers each shot is precisely predefined as to angle, content, duration. But Malick creates a set as a 360 degree environment and then films spontaneously within that. As the voiceovers added later augment and help keep the script to a minimum, there is little dialogue and the actors can create a natural, flowing feel to a scene that we immediately resonate with. This requires good actors, and the challenge seems to attract good actors.

SWIRLING CAMERAWORK

He often uses a stabilized Steadicam and has his actors move freely, the camera and actors swirling around each other as if the camera cannot make up its mind on viewpoint, can't decide what to look at, or is saying it wants no fixed viewpoint. There are very few static shots. A constantly shifting, tracking, panning, zooming movement. This gives a sense of depth, but also disorientation. Sometimes we look over a characters shoulder, sometimes directly into their face, sometimes from down low, sometimes the camera is on a slant, sometimes the tops of actors heads are cut off. Does this mimic our ordinary way of experiencing reality, as we don't sit still, as we move our eyes around, as we haphazardly encounter the world? Does it aid in seeing that there are multiple relationships in everything?

LIGHTING

Malick loves light. He loves especially the “magic hour”, the golden hour around sunset, and goes to great lengths to use as much of it as possible. The evening sky is often full of colour and the actors are in backlight, rimmed with golden light but with faces often dark with no fill light. Shadows are long. He likes to shoot with natural light, and avoids artificial lighting at other times. Lovers frolicking in a field in golden twilight is a frequent scene.

IMAGES

Malick has an amazing gift for the visual, for images, for ravishing images. Soldiers charge up a hill of beautifully waving grass. We are underwater looking up at the surface as a man, just shot, pitches head down into the water above and towards us. The camera moves directly and slowly into a grazing herd of huge buffalo. A woman walks away across the salt flats, the low sun in front of her sending her long shadow back to us. Farmers, black silhouettes against the golden sky, stand in clouds of swirling locust. He is not afraid to re-use images. One of his favourites is light and shadow on a curtain moving in an open window. And his static landscape shots are often brilliant compositions creating a beautiful image that would make any photographer jealous.

NATURE

Moments out of the characters' lives are interspersed with scenes of the natural world. The sky, light through trees, birds in flight, animals and bugs, moving water. The sun making a sunstar through trees overhead is a common image. Nature perhaps becomes the immortal impartial witness to the feeble machinations of mankind. Nature contains a wonder all around us but we fail to see in it what we really wish for.

VOICEOVER

Malick makes extensive use of voiceovers, often of a musing, existential manner. There is a pensive, meditative quality added to the film. This highlights the contrast between the outer world, the hard shell and bravado of human actions, and the inner world, our confusion and the tender questioning of our hearts. It makes us aware of a reality functioning behind surface reality. The voiceover is there from his first movie, in later films it carries more of the minimal plot of the film, which allows the actors to be more improvisational.

Lets look at his films one by one....

Badlands (1973): Teenage couple on a killing spree in 1958, loosely based on a true story. His first film, hints of his later style in evidence. Voiceover by a secondary character, mostly matter of fact. Some great shots on the South Dakota plains at dusk. Introduces one of his key visual images, the lone figure set against a vast landscape and sky, usually just after sunset. Several close shots of beetles anticipates another component of his style.

Days of Heaven (1978): 1916 love triangle on a wheat farm, highly praised voiceover by young girl, amazing dusk shots of Texas (well Alberta actually) prairie. Begins to use new invention the Steadicam for swirling shots. Closeups of bugs, frogs, cattle, moving grass etc. The immense sky often highlighted and human faces underexposed, dark. Days of Heaven was unusual with so much high-contrast lighting. In conventional Hollywood at the time the lighting in each scene was adjusted so that everything was clearly lit. The film wins an Academy Award for Cinematography for Nestor Almendros, the Director of Photography. Almendros and the other DP, Haskell Wexler, can be credited with helping Malick develop his style. Malick wins Best Director Award at Cannes. This is the film that made his reputation. In Days of Heaven there is plot, yes, although I actually missed the key pivot-point of the story, half way through, with little detriment to my pleasure.

The Thin Red Line (1998): After 20 year absence the director comes back with remake of James Jones novel of US infantry fighting Japanese in the Pacific war. Voiceovers begin to ask mystical questions, more dusk shots, sometimes it's even hard to see actors faces, swirling increases, closeups of alligators, birds, sometimes at the oddest moments. Even as soldiers savage their way through a Japanese camp, one soldier's voice is tenderly asking existential questions. Malick wins the Golden Bear, highest prize at Berlin Film Festival.

The New World (2005): The story of Pocahontas and John Smith, actors and camera swirling increases, gorgeous depiction of virgin wilderness surrounding Chesapeake Bay. Coy woman frolicking in tall grass with two smitten man (at different times).

The Tree of Life (2011): the average all-American dysfunctional suburban family, but that doesn't stop Malick from including dinosaurs and galaxies and the afterlife. His best film in terms of creating real characters, a real family. Introspective voiceovers whispered. Has been called pretentious. The film wins Palme d'Or, highest prize at Cannes.

To the Wonder (2012): Man attracts women but can't commit. Something about love. Scenes of woman and man wandering around in fields at dusk certainly not under-utilized. Olga Kurylenko should get the “Best Coy Cavorter in a Malick Film” award. Maybe a little more plot wouldn't hurt. But like all his films, deeply moving.

His later movies are a showcase for his style, and somehow he manages to largely avoid any mawkish, new age sentimentality. He is not afraid to handle violence and action, The Thin Red Line has a high body count, and all his films have included scenes of aggresion.

Malick, now 71, is rumoured to have two projects in the offing. Great! I for one have not tired yet of his unique style of storytelling.

Gravity

I really enjoyed Gravity. In some ways it's a standard Hollywood movie. Two big stars, a fast pace that keeps the characters rather dimensionless, and the usual cliched attempt at human interest.... something about having no will to survive because a young daughter died previously in a tragic accident.

All of this is secondary, because the movie makes us experience something for the first time, something we may have thought we knew. Other movies have shown humans orbiting in space. But Gravity presents space-walking with a reality and authenticity that sucks us right in. 

Many great movies have done this. Presented us with an experience of some reality that totally captures us. Das Boot was not the first movie about submarine warfare, but it was the first one that drew us in so powerfully because it conveyed  an authenticity that hit us in the gut. The chariot race in Ben Hur no doubt performed the same function. Platoon first showed some sense of the real Viet Nam war. The first horrific twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, the Omaha Beach scene, is a masterpiece of film making, tacked on before just another Hollywood war movie.

This is the achievement of Gravity, we have a new experience because of the authenticity and reality the film makers have managed to convey. I mean Holy Shit !!

And in the last minute, gravity never felt so good!

Greetings From Tim Buckley

Between 1965 and 1972 there was an amazing transformation in popular music, brought about by the appearance in those seven years of some of the major musical talents of the twentieth century.

Bands like the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane and Santana, to name just a few, came at us with a full body slam.

A number of performers presented us with a different music, rich in subtle emotion and poetic image. Of course we interpreted the wild imagery as psychedelic in origin, a disservice to their talents and proof of our naiveté, but hey, it was the Sixties.

Poetry was being smuggled into our consciousness through popular music.

Singers such as Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan all performed music with mystical lyrics and a sense of longing. Some of them, like Ochs, Collins and Dylan, came from a folk music, protest song background, but albums like Ochs's Pleasures of the Harbour, and Collins's Both Sides Now turned away from that towards a more experimental and esoteric meaning. Dylan gave one song, his hypnotic Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, a whole album side.

The standout for me is Tim Buckley. This man produced music that still thrills. In songs like Pleasant Street, Chase the Blues Away, Sweet Surrender, Song to the Siren, Phantasmagoria in Two, Carnival Song, No Man Can Find the War, Morning Glory, his voice has an impressive range from high falsetto to deep growl, his tone has a sweetness and purity, his emotion is often one of a deep yearning. Let me limit myself to saying, before I descend into shameless hyperbole, that his voice is magic. 

My poet friend Martin Singleton and I were lucky to see him at the Riverboat in Toronto in 1969, a show I had high hopes for, but for some reason didn't impress me that much. Buckley often threw his fans off with sudden changes in direction. I do remember how surprised I was that such a powerful voice came from a small man.

Tim made his first album at the age of nineteen, and made eight more before his death at twenty-eight of a heroin overdose. HIs son Jeff made one album before his death from accidental drowning at the age of thirty in 1997.

I recently saw a film called Greetings From Tim Buckley. The story jumps between two time periods, one in the late Sixties portrays Tim, the longer interval in the Nineties explores the life of his son Jeff Buckley, who saw almost nothing of his Father. The main focus is a Tim Buckley memorial concert in New York City (which actually occurred on April 26, 1991), in which Jeff reluctantly performs and which forces him to confront his feelings about his deceased father. An aspiring singer himself, one of my favourite scenes shows Jeff jamming with a guitarist who offers some new guitar licks he has been working on and Jeff begins to croon over top of them. The movie makers allow those of us familiar with Jeff's only album to realize for ourselves the song will later become the ecstatic Grace from his critically acclaimed album of the same name. A wonderful moment.

It's a good little film, although I grew somewhat tired of the actor playing Jeff doing "brooding and conflicted" while he showed off his handsome bone structure. A number of Tim's songs are on the soundtrack and their unexpected appearance each time gave me goosebumps.

A book called Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Tim and Jeff Buckley, is on my To Read list.

The Hunter

The star attraction of course in this movie is Willem Dafoe. If you've seen "The Last Temptation of Christ" you know what incredible presence this man can project. In this movie he starts out as the villain, (the good guy is already dead), and his redemption at the end is not really believable, although we'd like to try to believe. Why is it cold-hearted killers can convey such a fascinating zen-like presence? Is it their single-mindedness, their frequent obsessive-compulsive insistence on order, or just that they have a clarity, being free of the need for morality or social acceptance which clutters up the lives of us civilized folks?. A great little movie, well crafted, and you'll never forget what a Thylacine is. The Bluray edition is prefaced with a tourist ad for Tasmania, rather unnecessary given the amazing landscapes in the movie. 

Samurai at the Roxy

In 1971, a festival called Films of Japan opened at the Roxy Theatre in Toronto. For some reason I don't remember, I attended the first film, got hooked, and then attended all of the subsequent showings until the series was cancelled, halfway through the thirty-odd films.

One of the first films I saw was Samurai Rebellion. A black and white film made in 1967 by the director Masaki Kobayashi, it concerns a Samurai family slowly drawn into a confrontation with their lord. I was fascinated by the medieval dress, the interior simplicity of the dwellings of rich or poor, the elaborate protocol and intricate social systems, the highly ordered and stylized culture. The slowly mounting tension of the story finally explodes with incredibly fury. In the climax two Samurai friends who find themselves on opposite sides calmly duel to the death under dark clouds near a field of long grass undulating in a fierce wind. It was certainly one of the most powerful scenes I had ever seen in cinema at that point.

In 1971 Japan, although still notorious for it's aggression in World War Two, was just another little Asian country, known for cheap plastic toys. The first few cars from Japan had just started to trickle in with awkward names like Datsun, Toyoto and Mazda. The sole perception of quality was in Canon and Nikon cameras. There were only two or three Japanese restaurants in Toronto. But if Japan seemed quaint and irrelevant to those around me, it was no longer so for me.

Thus the beginnings of my Japanophilia. I was soon investigating the nation of islands any way I could. I encountered the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige and bought reproductions for my walls. I listened to Koto music. I experimented with a Japanese lunch item made by rolling up cold rice and various other ingredients in a sheet of dried seaweed and slicing the resulting log into sections. I visited the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center and naively bought a “Learn Japanese” manual. I read novels, poetry, biographies and travelogues. I got the first hints that all is not cherry blossoms and immaculate gardens in the Japanese psyche, that underneath lie some incredibly twisted and bizarre impulses and practices. I saw more films. My first car was made in Hiroshima. I planned to visit Japan.

These days, in my part of town, its easier to get sushi than a hamburger. The bin at the video store for the films of the modern director Takashi Miike is larger than those for Bergman and Fellini combined. Japan is no longer seen as quaint and irrelevant. But my interest persists. So yesterday I was pleased to find that I still possessed the poster for that film festival at the Roxy many years ago.

And notwithstanding my respect for Japan's most famous director, Akira Kurosawa, my three favourite films are still Samurai Rebellion, Harikiri and Kwaidan, all by Masaki Kobayashi.

Take Shelter

Hollywood is tripping over itself to do vampires, zombies, superheroes, remakes of foreign films, reissues in 3D. Then these little films like Take Shelter come along and make me believe in the magic of film again. Any film that really surprises me, that keeps me guessing, that sticks in my mind for days after to be digested, gets my vote.

I love quirky little films by unknown directors with unknown actors. Well, unknown actors at the time, Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain have since achieved enviable reputations.

Good films have a unique flavour, a mood, like a dream, that persists in the memory. A singular flavour created by the actors faces, the story, the music, the film making style. Cliched films have no residue because there is nothing new, but a good film creates its own mood unlike any other.
 

This film, somewhat of a harrowing experience, concerns a very ordinary man living a very ordinary life who begins to realize that something deep and ominous and unknown is beginning to form in his world and no one else can sense it.

The ending stands as the most powerful and perfectly realized two minutes of film-making I can remember. And the musical score is brilliant and perfectly suited to the film.