Classic SPT: We Are Spirits Living in a Rendered World

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Jack Sully sure looks real, but that thing in the tube behind him feels a little... blue? Couldn't resist.

Another Classic Still Playing with Toys blog from all the way back on January 8, 2010. In a further effort to preserve some of the more memorable articles from the past, here now is a little blog on thoughts of CGI and its impact on the film biz from the wayback machine which still feels relevant toward my feelings of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film... Enjoy.

It's okay; I can hear your groans all the way through the interwebs... someone else spewing about how CGI has ruined movies, like we haven't heard that before. But, especially after watching a few twenty to thirty year old movies over the Christmas Break, it continues to be clear to me that movies have completely lost a sense of peril after the advent of CG effects. Oh, and movies have people falling uncontrollably through the air a whole lot more than they used to...

I'm still in a pretty grim mood from seeing Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol... and I saw the movie almost two months ago. You know the old adage that less is more? I really think it needs to be printed to the top of every computer monitor in Hollywood.

But let me rewind a second, I'm jumping completely ahead of myself here...

1985.

Marty McFly is stuck at a hand-painted starting line, while Doc Brown hangs perilously from the hands of the Clocktower. My palms are sweating; I'm engaged and genuinely concerned for both of these characters simultaneously. Doc confidently gets an idea and wraps the cable around the clock's minute hand, while Marty slams his head against the steering wheel in frustration... and the car mysteriously starts. Doc heroically ziplines down the cable and into the bushes - the audience cheers. The hamster running the wheel inside my brain informs me that this is awesome and I smile...

Twenty-odd years later, I'm sitting in the theater and Scrooge is falling through the air (again) hitting icicles, bails of hay, and all these other completely inhuman acts that would otherwise kill a spry teenager let alone a frail old miser. This old dude could (and should) be paste on the cobblestone streets. And, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

He's completely CG. He has no weight or tangibility to him. Let me set aside the fact that the story is such a mess that I don't care about him or his redemption in the first place, but I'm not engaged and I definitely am not concerned for him. Why should I be? When he hits something he's going to bounce back up like he's Gumby (dammit). My palms aren't sweating because it's abundantly clear that what I'm viewing isn't real, and it's animation that's attempting to look real, which further confuses that hamster on the wheel. 

As I was sitting watching Jurassic Park for the millionth time, I found myself wondering why I cared so much for the characters in this CG world. Why Jurassic Park, a movie made in the digital age, still made me feel like the films that were made photo chemically. 

I love the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie, but Kirk on the ice planet getting chased by generic Cloverfield monster number twelve that we've seen CG animated doesn't get the same chemical and emotional reaction from me as the heroes in the gas powered Jeep being chased by the T-Rex ("Must go faster, must go faster..."). 

Why?

Richard Kimbel stands at the edge of a seemingly bottom-less reservoir and looks down - and I feel vertigo right there with him. But Jake Sully falling off the edge of a floating mountain tied to a winged beast doesn't elicit the same response.

Why?

Marty McFly, on his skateboard, latches onto a pickup truck and wheels through the streets of the city and waves to all the passers by and I immediately think, "I want to do that." But Scrooge attaches to the back of a horse-drawn buggy on a fully rendered (and obvious homage to McFly's mode of transportation) and skids through the streets and my reaction is a whole-hearted "meh, whatever."

Why?

I wish I knew. 

Sure, I'd bet that the most prevalent and probably winning argument out there would be that I experienced the former examples for the first time at a younger age when things were new and exciting and I wasn't conditioned to all of these exhilarating moments and events. Maybe time and age has made me so cynical that I don't connect anymore and it's just something that I have to deal with. 

But then why do I feel warm-hearted when I'm watching a movie and something emotional happens? Why do I fight back tears when the main character deals with the death of his father? I obviously have the ability to continue to connect to the characters that I'm viewing on the screen when they're human, when they're real. 

I get choked up at the end of Wall-E and at the beginning of Up... they're fully animated, so it can't be that I'm completely averse to computer generated imagery. But wait, Wall-E - a task-driven robot from the grim future is human, likable, I'm concerned for him and care about him. 

But wait, in the new Star Trek movie I connect with each and every character because they've exhibited signs of being human and I'm enjoying the ride - but the minute the hot pink snow monster starts chasing Kirk, I'm completely taken out of it. Is it because the threat doesn't seem tangible anymore? Because the monster is just a plot device of convenience rather than something that's been introduced ominously and built up to be something to fear?

Ah ha... perhaps that's it. To coin a phrase from the film I was watching that stimulated this internal conversation with myself, the filmmakers were so preoccupied with the fact that they could, they didn't stop to think if they should... 

That's great that we now have the ability in a 3D environment to have Jim Carrey fall through the Earth's inner atmosphere with his arms flailing and the clouds billowing around him. But is that really what A Christmas Carol is all about? It's incredibly perilous that Jake Sully is forced off a cliff with no means of stopping his decent, but I've been watching the CG characters climb two-mile high vines to get to that point without a care in the world, or without any effort being shown. It's obviously not that dangerous because nobody's really concerned. The threat isn't real.

CG is awesome, it's freed up a great deal of visionaries to fulfill their greatest fantasies... but if they lose sight that every human is not super human, that every creature does not need motivation, that the visual and not the story can express danger, fear, and emotion... then what's the point?  You can paint me a picture of a basketball and I'll look at it and go "hey, that looks pretty life-like, that's definitely a basketball," or you can be in the worst, foulest mood of your life and paint me a picture of a deflated basketball that's been worn and overused... and I'll definitely be able to tell the difference.

Because it'll make me feel something.

Classic SPT: Blues Brothers 2000, What the Hell Happened?

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If Liam Neeson's daughter can keep getting Taken... surely Elwood can go on a few Missions from God?

In the migration of Still Playing with Toys over to the new site, many of the old articles and discussion threads have been sentenced to the internet Forbidden Zone. In an effort to preserve the one or two of them that were actually decent, we'll be posting up some Classic SPT for your reading pleasure.

The following article was originally posted to Still Playing with Toys on September 5, 2013:

This past weekend, a dinner conversation with friends about the sideways turn of Blues Brothers 2000 prompted a bit of a research binge during lunch today. One mission was to be discovered within the research: what the hell happened with Blues Brothers 2000?

They waited all those years to do a sequel and they didn't wait for Jim Belushi to be available? Where'd the kid come from? Where was the edge? Hey, at least the music was good. -- all these thoughts running through my head as I scoured the web for answers. And then I found it. For some reason two articles that had passed me by over the years where director John Landis had spoken out about the sequel and given some insight as to why it was so lost in the woods.

The first article, from the AV Club gives us this insight from director John Landis:

We'd always intended for a sequel with John, but of course when he passed away, it was obvious we weren't going to do it. But Danny had been performing with John Goodman and Jimmy Belushi and the band, and he said, "You know, this is great, because this music is recognized now—let's do a movie." I said, "Great, sure, okay," and we wrote what I thought was a terrific script. Then Universal Studios eviscerated it. That was a strange experience, because the first thing they said was that it had to be PG, which meant they couldn't use profanity, which is basically cutting the Blues Brothers' nuts off. The first movie is an R-rated film, but there's no nudity or violence in it. It's just the language. Then they said, "You have to have a child, you have to have..." The bottom line was, the only way that movie was going to get made was to agree with everything they said. You know the difference between a brown-nose and a shithead? Depth perception. That's the only time I never really fought with the studio, because they didn't really want to make it. So we did every single thing they said. By the time we'd done that, the script was kind of homogenized and uninteresting. Danny said, "It's about the music. It's just about the music, John, so don't worry about it. We'll get the best people, and we'll make a great album, and get these people on film. We have to document these people." It's interesting, because, as much as I make fun of Danny, three or four of those guys have passed away since we made that movie. People say, "Okay, you've got Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, and John Lee Hooker in The Blues Brothers—who's in Blues Brothers 2000?" The answer? Everyone else. The first movie has five musical numbers, and the second movie has 18.

Interesting. 

Essentially the downfall of the film was the downfall of several other movie franchises like Robocop, Terminator and others that relied upon a certain edge and certain maturity in order for the lightning in a bottle that they had captured. When the edict came down to make the film more appealing to a broader audience, with it came several of the concessions (ie. "Buster" Blues, Elwood suddenly smiling all the time, etc.).

And Landis outright admits that if they would have fought any of the mandates from the powers that be, the movie would have never been made. So he and Aykroyd decided to focus on the music and to hell with the threads that wove between it.

Another article from IFC gives us more:

I was very pissed off by what Universal did to me on ‘Blues Brothers 2000′ and that was my first experience with the new corporate Hollywood. It’s very different. Everything is by committee now, and they destroyed that movie, though the music is still good. This happens to filmmakers all the time, where producers and studios fuck with their picture, and when you’re promoting the movie you can’t say that. [Laughs.] The directors get blamed for things that are clearly not their fault. .../... It’s a combination of economics and we live in a very conservative and reactionary and frightened time. People are scared shitless in terms of taking risks on movies. Would the studios ever make a movie like ‘Into The Night’ now? Or even ‘Animal House?’

More fuel for the above fire. And an interesting perspective on Animal House - obviously a risk like an American Pie in the early 2000s since it's a film geared toward late high school and early college aged teens but carried R ratings. 

But why no Jim Belushi stepping in to replace his late brother in Blues Brothers 2000? Apparently, from what I've been able to glean, the scheduling of production on his show Total Security didn't allow him to get away in time for production on the film. But why not wait for him? I haven't been able to find an answer to that, but based on John Landis' comments above, my guess would be that the studio wanted to hit a release date within a window of a schedule that wouldn't allow them to hold production until Belushi was available.

Such a strange series of events in another weird tale of how making a film in the Hollywood studio system can be like pushing a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like boulder up a mountain.

Itchy Wool and Broken Wings

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"Making sequels ain't like dusting crops, kid." Or at least, I think that's how the line went?

Chances are, if you've touched the internet or viewed television at any point over the last couple weeks, you've heard that Harrison Ford broke his leg the second week of June while filming on the latest Star Wars sequel at the Pinewood Studios. This morning, "news" is out there that Ford is up and walking again using "a prosthetic limb" (thanks Daily Mail) - I put both in quotes because the concept of news and the use of such a strange term as prosthetic limb in the headline makes it as attention grabbing as possible, I'm sure.

A while ago, I had written an open letter to my heroes after a viewing of Spielberg's War Horse (unfortunately now that the site has migrated the old blog has been taken offline otherwise I could link back to the past). In short, the letter suggested that the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who were responsible for so much of my childhood, had gotten too comfortable in their more recent days. Having people around them that never say no and never being challenged by anything had made them complacent and the quality of their films was mirroring that state.

Take a look at a film like Jaws, which is so incredibly effective because the challenges of the mechanical shark forced Spielberg to get creative with how he was playing with the audience. Fear in the unseen. Now, a couple weeks of VFX to the cheapest bitter and you can have all the Bruce you can handle in a film like Jaws.

This is the long way of going about saying it, but Ford breaking his ankle (though you never wish ill of people that they break their legs requiring surgery) might be a good sign of things to come. It's a challenge for the creative team that they have to work around and, to use the cliche, forces them to think outside the box to figure out a workaround. Bluntly, it forces the Above the Liners on the call sheet to move outside their comfort zone and not rely on the easy way out.

Films like Wizard of Oz, the first X-Men film, and countless others have had to deal with major adversity (let's be honest every film has to deal with some sort of adversity which is the main reason a go-to question in EPKs is "what was the biggest challenge of _____"). And for some reason, even though it's at the expense of poor Harrison Ford's leg, I see this as yet another positive toward the film we'll be seeing next December.

The Wizard - 25 Years Later

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Lucas and his oh-so-bad Power Glove in a behind the scenes image courtesy of director Todd Holland.

It's hard to believe that it's been 25 years since kids were introduced to Super Mario Bros. 3 in one of the most elaborate marketing moves of its time. For over 90-minutes, Universal Pictures' The Wizard took us on the journey to California of Jimmy Woods ("Gimme gimme gimme... Jimmy Woods") and his brother Corey, played by Fred Savage.

I was eight at the time that the movie was released, and I was at that highly impressionable age where everything I saw in movies, I wanted. Proton packs, Talkboys, heavy-so-they-must-be-expensive night vision goggles, you name it - if it was featured in a film and made an impression, I wanted one. So it's no surprise that in an era where we were eating, sleeping, and breathing Nintendo that a film came out featuring all-new Nintendo products and I went bananas. 

We all wanted to be Jimmy Woods, on a trip to California with our big brother to play in the Video Armageddon. We all wanted our sage-like guide to be a feisty redhead who made us feel kinda funny in our stomachs. We all wanted to spend all day on the Nintendo Power Play Tip Hotline getting the best ways to beat games (without paying the 95¢ a minute or whatever ridiculousness the hotline cost at that point). And of course, the film did its job and made us all salivate over the prospect of a third Super Mario game.

Thanks to social media director Todd Holland has been "live Tweeting" production of the film as if it were happening today. Twenty-five years to each day, he's Tweeting out never before seen photos from each day of production giving us a glimpse behind the scenes and actors Fred Savage and Jenny Lewis have been interacting with him. It's an interesting commentary on the making of the film, something which I'm sure the DVD/Blu-ray world will never have a chance of seeing based upon how studio heads view the film (in fact, I think it was just Universal hitting the dredges toward the tail end of DVD's heyday that made The Wizard actually see the light of digital day. Which is unfortunate.)

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Critics panned the film, mainly put off that The Wizard is a thinly veiled commercial/product tie-in. But despite promotional intent, The Wizard was and still is a fun road trip coming of age story. Sentiment and nostalgia for the film help, but Holland is able to evoke real emotion and character through all of the actors particularly the three kid leads but also Beau Bridges and Christian Slater as they chase after the kids. The beautiful "on the road" imagery shot by cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman (now a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson since Rushmore having recently filmed The Grant Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom) is gorgeous and one wishes the film would get a proper remaster just for the landscapes of late 1980's America. A 1080p HD version is available through iTunes but appears that it could benefit from a little love and care.

The movie acts as an intriguing musical time capsule of 1989, with Bobby Brown/New Kids on the Block pumping at full volume and my original introduction to Real Life's "Send Me an Angel" which continues to make it onto road trip playlists because of the film to this day.

Twenty-five years later, I still look back at the film fondly both as a memory of being a kid in the late 80s and also as a catalyst for so much excitement and fun in a Nintendo brand feeding frenzy that more recent generations have yet to experience. Getting the rare glimpse behind the scenes care of Holland has been a treat and a welcome bit of nostalgia to kick off the summer.

Be sure to follow director Todd Holland @ToddHolland3 to view all of his behind the scenes imagery and to get a glimpse into a world not so far away.