David here:

I’m usually a terrible prophet. But when I first saw Infernal Affairs (2002), I decided that Hong Kong filmmakers had finally made a Hollywood film. Comprehensible exposition, intricate plotting, and well-earned twists have never been strong points of local cinema. I tried to show in Planet Hong Kong that this filmmaking tradition favored episodic construction and virtuoso staging and strictly organized visceral arousal. But in IA Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak Siu-fai produced a tit-for-tat crime movie with ingenious intrigue and a density of characterization.

Filled with both top-line stars and powerful character actors, it proved a box-office sensation across Asia, triggering an ambitious prequel/sequel and a strange third installment that is much more like the scattershot Hong Kong movie a lot of us have come to love. Now IA has become the first local film to be remade overseas. Nice as it is to see Media Asia highlighted, the credits of The Departed offer only a stingy mention of the source.

The Departed has been hailed as a big comeback for Scorsese, a filmmaker who has had as many comebacks as Woody Allen, usually to as little effect. The critics are going nuts. “A new American crime classic,” declares Rolling Stone. Newsweek‘s reviewer grants that the Hong Kong original is “terrific” but in the next sentence declares that “Screenwriter William Monahan has done a terrific job transposing the story to ethnically fraught Boston.” Terrific reviewing too: No wonder people turn to the Internet to get less packaged commentary.

Even though IA leaned toward Hollywood, the differences are instructive. (Spoilers in this and the next paragraph.) Structurally, The Departed swerves from the original in a way that softens its impact. In IA, the final twist leaves the Triad mole in the police alive and victorious. In a local context, this ending gains a powerfully bleak effect. A Hong Kong movie hero needn’t survive the final confrontation (he even gains in stature from dying grandly), but the villain is seldom left standing.

In most respects Monahan’s script adheres to the original beat by beat, or rather bleep by cellphone bleep. But the American ending is oddly more faithful to the Hong Kong mainstream. Now our hero doesn’t die in vain. The bad dude is paid back, thanks to a contrived in-case-of-my-death message sent to the shrink-girlfriend whom the two protagonists share. Ironically, Monahan’s ending is akin to the obligatory punishment on display in the version of Infernal Affairs reshot to placate Mainland China’s censors. Maybe American and Chinese tastes align more than we think.

Most reviews have warmly welcomed the return of the tone of GoodFellas and Mean Streets, but I’m more hesitant. We’ve seen a lot of this before. Again guys cuss a lot and make sexist jokes. (The first ten minutes have three references to menstruation, none complimentary.) Again confrontations and whackings are underscored by boomer rock tunes. And again the camera swaggers. Scorsese’s visual bravado was always a bit overhyped; did he bequeath us the idea that every scene had to have “energy”? This time out the tricks seem to me forced; I didn’t think we needed so many cut-off pans and swiveling camera moves.

Apparently Scorsese originally wanted something a bit fresher, as we learn from the October American Cinematographer (eventually to be online here). He asked Director of Photography Michael Ballhaus to study not only master cinematographer John Alton’s movies for Anthony Mann (T-Men, Raw Deal) but also hard-edged Korean neo-noir like Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and Bad Guy (Kim Ki-duk, 2001).

By asking me to watch those wild Asian movies, I think Marty was pushing me to try something different. I tried to do that, but after a couple of days on the shoot I realized that although the styles of those movies were great for the particular stories they were telling, we were doing an American movie with American stars. In the end, I had to pull back a bit from those wilder styles; I couldn’t go that far with this movie (p. 38).

Maybe that’s the problem. Wild films don’t get nominated for Academy Awards. True, wild performances do, but even satanic Jack probably wouldn’t eat a big live squid (as does the hero of Oldboy, right). Long ago Taxi Driver inspired Hong Kong filmmakers to push harder, but instead of replying in kind, Scorsese/Ballhouse leave it to B entertainments like Crank, Torque, Running Scared, and Domino to nudge Hollywood toward Asian extroversion.

Even more eagerly than The Aviator, The Departed embraces what I’ve called “intensified continuity.” (See Film Art Chapter 6 and The Way Hollywood Tells It, Part 2) In this style, conversation scenes feature very little movement of actors around the set. Performers sit or stand and deliver their lines in isolated shots (singles) or over-the-shoulder (OTS) setups. The visual stasis is compensated for by lots of cutting, camera movements, and tight close-ups.

The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning these ASLs:

Mean Streets 7.7 seconds
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 8.0 seconds
Taxi Driver 7.3 seconds
King of Comedy 7.7 seconds
Gangs of New York 6.7 seconds
The Aviator 3.6 seconds

Like his contemporaries, Scorsese has succumbed to the fast-cut, hyper-close style that has made our movies so pictorially routine, however well-suited they may be for display on TV monitors and computer screens and iPods. In 1990 he seems to have realized that he needed to pick up the pace. Of GoodFellas (ASL 6.7 seconds) he remarked: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [GoodFellas] is sort of my version of MTV. . . but even that’s old-fashioned” (The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 152). (For more on measuring ASLs, see the Cinemetrics site here.)

Speaking of editing: It’s blasphemy, but I’ve been long convinced that Scorsese’s films aren’t particularly well-edited. Look at any conversation scene, particularly the OTS passages, and you’ll see blatant mismatches of position, eyeline, and gesture. Spoons, hands, and cigarettes jump around spasmodically. In The Departed, Alec Baldwin somehow loses his beer can in a reverse shot, and in the swanky restaurant, it’s hard to determine if there are one or two of those towering chocolate desserts on the table.

This may seem picky, but craft competence is not for nothing. Current reliance on tightly framed faces tends to sacrifice any sense of the specifics of a place. In most scenes, actors are so overcloseupped that little space is left for geography, even the mundane layout of a police station. Choppy cutting also subtly jars our sense of a smooth performance. Why can’t our directors sustain a fixed two-shot of the principals and let the actors carry the scene–not just with the lines they say but with the way they hold their bodies and move their hands and employ props? Scorsese, though always a heavy shot/reverse-shot user, held full shots to greater effect in earlier movies.

Space on a larger scale matters too. The atmosphere of Hong Kong was conveyed far more vividly in the original IA than the landscape of Boston is here. The most concrete locale seems to be a Chinatown porn theatre (filmed at New York’s Cinema Village). There’s also a gilded State House dome that is distressing in its lumpy symbolism. For more textured renderings of a parallel milieu, I’d recommend the comparatively overlooked State of Grace (1990) and The Yards (2000).

I’d love to join the applause that welcomes Scorsese back, but for these and other reasons I have to sit on my hands. For me, the inventiveness of the Asian tradition still reigns supreme in the crime genre. I grant that Infernal Affairs accepts the energy-aesthetic, with its swooping camera moves and its 3.2 second ASL. But the camera gives its actors room to breathe, and it spares some time to define a scene’s locale.

On a higher level of accomplishment stand Johnnie To’s The Mission, PTU, A Hero Never Dies, and half a dozen other films–very likely including the most recent, Exiled–along with the dazzling works of Kitano Takeshi and several other Asian directors. These are truly terrific.

P.S. 20 Oct 2006: This post on Scorsese’s Departed started a passionate and pretty discerning discussion over on Jim Emerson’s Scanners blog. You can read the thread, including my horrendously long comment, here.

From David:

While I was at Vancouver, I didn’t see Screen International for Sept 15, but I’ve caught up since I got back. SI reports extensively on Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. Budgeted at $11 million, it has become the top-grossing Korean film of all time (in unadjusted dollars). It was released in July, and 38 days later it had 12.37 million admissions in its domestic market, beating The King and the Clown. The subsequent Asian rollout has yielded a total gross of $77.8 million as of 15 Sept. The Host will open in Europe in November, and in the US, distributed by Magnolia, in late January 2007.

Mr Bong was kind enough to give me a CD of the soundtrack, and it’s a lively and varied score. I recommend it. When we first met in 1995, he told me that Film Art was widely pirated in Korea, so at Vancouver I gave him a copy of The Way Hollywood Tells It. This is the source of his comments in the inscription: “To David Bordwell! Thanks for your amazing book! (My legal version copy!) Good luck!” Maybe some of his luck with The Host will rub off on me….

Kristin here–

I have finally caught up with Cars, the new Pixar animated film. Not brand new, exactly, but it’s still playing second run on the big screen here in Madison. Good thing, too, because it would be difficult to appreciate its technical virtuosity on DVD. (It’s due out on DVD on November 7.)

For me, part of the fun of watching a Pixar’s film is to try and figure out what technical challenge the filmmakers have set themselves this time. Every film pushes the limits of computer animation in one major area, so that the studio has been perpetually on the cutting edge. In Cars, that area is light and reflections. The comic scene of Tow Mater running around backwards has a breathtakingly flashy effect, literally, when he runs into a forest and can be tracked only by the rapid bursts of light that come through the trees.

The reflections are dazzling at times. By choosing highly polished cars and trucks as characters, the filmmakers forced themselves to devise ways of showing light realistically bouncing off their painted surfaces. This happens in virtually every scene, but the moment when the refurbished town of Radiator Springs turns on its array of neon lights in the evening is a real tour de force. The vehicles parade up and down the main street, and the reflections run over their surfaces from every side. (This segment and the design of the town’s drive-in restaurant irresistibly recall the appealing look of American Graffiti.)

Cars builds on the methodical technical progress Pixar has made over the past decade.
Perhaps the greatest technical challenge in this kind of animation comes in “rendering,” or adding surface texture and color to images. In the early 1990s, Pixar invented RenderMan, a program that made a huge leap forward in the sophistication of this process. It was used for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993), which included relatively few shots because rendering was so time-consuming and complicated. RenderMan has since become one of the most basic tools for creating CGI (computer-generated imagery), and it can be seen among the technical credits of almost any big effects-heavy film, including The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006).

Many versions of RenderMan have come out since its invention, and the studio’s animated features have been the driving force behind its progress–though its short films also provide early testing grounds for new developments. In 1995, the studio released the first feature-length movie made entirely with CGI (computer-generated imagery), Toy Story. At that point, rendering anything beyond colored, smooth surfaces was impossible. Toy Story revolved around toys precisely because they could look reasonably realistic despite such limitations. The challenge then was simply to make a full-length film with CGI and to make it an absorbing, amusing story.

Objects with more complicated surfaces, especially composed of many tiny objects moving independently but alongside each other, required technical innovations. In a bug’s life (1998), it was realistic grass. Monsters, Inc. (2001) went a step further and created believable fur. (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within came out that same year, touting its creation of realistically moving human hair, but it lagged behind the sophistication of Pixar’s big fuzzy blue monster.)

Substances that move in complicated and random ways have always been tough to animate—especially water and fire. Disney’s 1940s features, which were of course drawn animation, were great partly because the studio had the resources to conjure up realistic water (for the sea scenes in Pinocchio, 1940) and fire (in Bambi, 1942). Pixar pushed RenderMan to create extraordinary water effects in Finding Nemo (2003).

The Incredibles (2004) didn’t focus on one single challenge in the way that most Pixar features do, but its main accomplishment was to create a strong 3D look to the sets and characters while finding stylized designs for the first human cast to populate one of the studio’s features.

By the way, the surface that had remained the most difficult to simulate realistically using CGI—human skin—was finally achieved by two other companies. One was ILM (George Lucas’ special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic) when it created the infamous Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). The other was Weta Digital, which animated Gollum in Rings.

In Cars, the reflections in the distinctive surfaces of painted cars was enabled by another upgrading of the RenderMan system, adding a ray-tracing capability—a capability that also assisted in creating realistic shadows and other tricks of lighting. (For a discussion of many aspects of the making of Cars, check here.)

Overall, of course, Pixar’s uninterrupted streak of hit features stems from the fact that all this technology is put in the service of smart, funny, well-constructed stories. I’ve seen some reviews suggesting that Cars isn’t quite as amusing or engrossing as many previous Pixar films, but I don’t think it suffers at all in comparison. There are so many puns, both verbal and visual, that one has to be very alert to notice them. There’s a running gag about a naive car being overjoyed when the famous racecars keep calling him by name—not remembering that he’s sporting a personalized license plate reading “Fred.” Every time that happens, it gets whisked over so quickly and in such action-packed compositions that it would be easy to miss.

Another thing that struck me about Cars, and this has nothing to do with the technology used, is the extraordinary stylistic differences between the two main environments in which Lightning McQueen, our hero, finds himself. The racing-world scenes are, predictably, fast and lively: very quick editing, the hero’s visions of the crowd, superimpositions, camera movements, and loud, loud sound create a hectic pace. The sweeping desert landscapes and sleepy little town, on the other hand, have gentle music and sound effects, a much slower cutting pace, and a general leisureliness. Yet the result did not bore me in the least, for the design of the surroundings and the group of eccentric vehicles that “people” Radiator Springs provide a different sort of enjoyment—and indeed a bit of relaxation after the visual and sonic bombardment of the opening. Other films have contrasted different setting by using stylistic techniques, but I can’t think of one where the gap between them is so broad.

I note that the supplements listed for the DVD being released in a month don’t include any real making-of documentaries. Presumably a special edition will come out later that will feature some, and maybe then we’ll get to witness some of the technique behind all those lights and reflections. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen Cars and live someplace where it’s still in a theater, give it a try.

Kristin here–

Recently I wrote some comments on MGM’s announcement that it will co-produce The Hobbit with New Line Cinema.  Yesterday TheOneRing.net posted a statement from an MGM executive declaring that preliminary discussions with “Mr. Jackson’s representatives” have started.   It’s hard to believe such an announcement would be made public if things weren’t looking very promising!