Kristin here—

As David has mentioned, I made a short trip to England to deal with inventorying the latest additions to the P. G. Wodehouse Archive. I got back last night to resume work on The Frodo Franchise and to hold up my end of the blog.

Having been in a lovely old farmhouse in the rolling hills of southern England the whole time, I don’t have any film-related experiences from the trip to report. Going and coming, however, was another matter.

For years now we’ve been hearing about the airlines installing these wonderful new systems that will allow bored travelers to choose from a long list of films (or music or video games) to view on personal monitors. It’s finally happening, and for the first time I was on a new plane that had these systems.

I have to say, they’re pretty neat. Definitely a big improvement on the old ways of watching movies on airplanes. When I started flying, movies were shown on 16mm, projected on screens at the front of each cabin. Naturally from most positions, you had to stretch your neck to see over the seats in front of you, and if you were way on the side at the front of the cabin, it was a lost cause.

Eventually video projection replaced 16mm, but that only made the picture fuzzier. The airlines then went for quantity, showing old sit-coms, documentaries, and, naturally, ads.

Business class cabins came to feature personal monitors, which emerged on a swiveling pole from a chamber under one armrest. These offered a choice of maybe half a dozen films on different channels. The screen was small, and these films were playing on a loop, on at the same time for everyone in business class. If you missed the beginning, you could wait a couple of hours until it started again, or just watch the beginning after seeing the rest of the film first. The movie rolled merrily along even while announcements were made or dinners served.

These new systems are somewhat like watching movies on a small laptop that doesn’t have quite all the controls that we’re used to. A remote stored in the arm of the chair navigates you through various help screens and menus. I didn’t count how many movies were on offer, but it must have been more than 30, ranging from The Devil Wore Prada to Fight Club to Sideways, with a sampling for kids as well.

You watch the film (or whatever) on a small screen imbedded in the seat in front of you. It’s a fairly decent size, given the circumstances, maybe six inches wide. (Didn’t happen to have my ruler handy.) Bigger than the little screens on the typical business-class monitor, anyway. The picture seemed sharper, though there was a tendency for ambient light to wash out the dark parts of the image.

The main thing, though, is that you have lots more control over the film. You start it when you want, and if there are interruptions, you can pause it. Meal service and other distractions don’t make you miss bits. I even could stare out the window as we passed over Greenland and then go back to watching Meryl Streep bullying Anne Hathaway.

I wouldn’t exactly recommend this new system for close film analysis, but apart from pausing, the remote does let you go fast backward or forward. I couldn’t find a way to go in slow motion or frame-by-frame, but I suspect there’s not a lot of demand for that sort of thing.

So, after years of not watching movies on airplanes—even on those lovely, rare occasions when I got to go business class—I now have that option again. I even watched Cars again. I enjoyed its narrative and wit, but it made me very glad I had seen it on the big screen already. Clearly one would do well to choose films to watch on this new system carefully. I feel fairly confident that The Devil Wears Prada didn’t suffer all that much, but I can’t imagine seeing Fight Club for the first time under such circumstances.

One other cautionary note: the films I watched weren’t letterboxed, and I suspect the others on offer weren’t, either.

I was traveling via Northwest on an A330. NW also has these systems on its 747-400s, and I presume other airlines have them on their newer planes. I don’t know if it would be possible to retro-fit older planes with systems this elaborate. It will probably be a long time before every flight will let us summon up movies according to whim.

Now, if they could only do something about those little headphones!

DB here:

I’ve never understood why many people in film studies ignore what practicing filmmakers tell us about their work. If we want to know about technique, form, and the creative process, we should understand filmmakers’ craft knowledge, the tricks of their trade. Filmmakers know an awful lot, and we benefit from listening to them.

So books of interviews can be quite valuable. They take us into the kitchen and let us watch chefs at work. Sometimes they follow recipes but just as often they throw things together with inspired, or disastrous, results.

Among the best of the interview books is Pat McGilligan’s Backstory series, about screenwriters and their craft. Backstory 4, just out from the University of California Press, is an addictive read, and I recommend it. McGilligan has done a wonderful job assembling these interviews, most of which he also conducted. You can’t fail to learn about filmmaking, and along with that, the wit of people who use language for their living just cheers you up. A few samples out of many:

Walter Hill: “Shoot me as the Antichrist, but I never much liked the Beatles.”

Paul Mazursky: “Voice-overs are like a good drug.”

Donald Westlake: “People shouldn’t be handed a camera until they reach the age of reason.”

Alvin Sargent: “I hardly ever finish books. You know, Paper Moon is adapted from a book, and I truly didn’t read the last part of it. I just couldn’t read that book any more. I got bored.”

John Milius: “Our whole world, our whole culture, is like a giant high-school dance.”

Westlake again: “David Hockney is the only thing that’s ever been improved by being moved to Los Angeles.”

I’m especially glad that McGilligan included two of my favorite novelists. Elmore Leonard comes off as good-humoredly disillusioned with the screenwriting process. Just as important, there’s an enlightening interview with the prolific but still too little celebrated Donald E. Westlake. Westlake is known for his comic crime novels, but even better, methinks, is his hard-boiled fiction signed by Richard Stark. The Stark novels center on the professional thief Parker, and they’re unsentimental, stripped to the bone, and formally quite adventurous. One thing we learn from Backstory 4 is that one of the best Parker novels, The Jugger, was the putative source for Godard’s Made in USA. Westlake: “such a rotten movie.”

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry that the same issue of American Cinematographer (October 2006) reports that Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus worked a cross motif into the architecture, lighting, and set design of The Departed. “These crosses, which the crew dubbed the ‘X motif,’ appear whenever a character is in mortal danger,” explains the article’s author Stephen Pizzello. He quotes gaffer Andy Day: “We even had grips and electricians saying, ‘Hey, we could put an X here!’ Michael was always very excited if someone found another place to put an X. He and Marty did it partly as a homage to the great noir films, and also to create a sense of imminent doom” (p. 47).

Two comments: (a) I noticed it a couple of times; I wonder if viewers catch it explicitly or sense it intuitively? (b) Ballhaus says that it refers to a motif in T-Men, which I confess I never noticed. But the same motif was used in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), as Hawks himself explained in interviews. It’s quite heavily stressed in that film, most memorably during a sequence in a bowling alley, when a pencilled X records a strike just before a crook is gunned down on the lane!

DB

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.