Weekly Reel, July 19
News: Cannes Palme d'or Winner, Nielsen Report: Streaming v. Cable/Broadcast, New LA Mask Mandate, "Blow Out" Retro-Review, and the Live-Action/Animation Hybrid Genre.
At the 74th Festival de Cannes, Titane by Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’or, marking only the second female director to win the crème de la crème of international film awards. Spike Lee, who chaired the Feature Film Jury, in a wonderful gaffe accidentally revealed the winner early into the awards ceremony. Perhaps this was his retribution for the festival failing to give Do the Right Thing proper recognition back in 1989 after the Jury had personally invited him to this closing ceremony. Since then, Lee has always held a personal grudge against then Jury chair, Wim Wenders.
The latest Nielsen report shows streaming services (26%) narrowly overtaking broadcast viewing (25%) but well behind cable’s dominance (39%) in terms of share of television time. Exclusively live sporting events accounts for a majority of the cable/broadcast combined majority, which have yet to fully transition over to streaming, most notably with Disney’s ESPN. NBCUniversal will try to set the standard by streaming most of its exclusive Olympics coverage on Peacock. But overall, it seems that legacy media will try to control what little leverage they have left until streaming services fully take over, which might not be in the near future if this Nielsen report is to be believed.
Los Angeles is reinstating a mask mandate for all indoor events/activities, which includes movie theaters and film sets, because of the rising level of Covid cases. Although most theaters were already complying with the mask mandate, those who are vaccinated need to wear masks again because of the American branch of the anti-vaxxer death cult.
Retro-Review: Blow Out (Brian De Palma, United States, 1981)
Brian De Palma and John Travolta had inverse career trajectories that intersected in the first few years of the eighties. As Travolta was peaking in the late seventies with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, he soon ran into commercial and critical failures after Blow Out until making his triumphant return in Pulp Fiction. And with De Palma, he had reached his peak during Travolta’s downturn in the eighties, which began the year before Blow Out with Dressed to Kill. But instead of making his own triumphant return in the nineties, De Palma unfortunately couldn’t return to his earlier directorial confidence.
Blow Out, as Pauline Kael mentioned in her review, is a mix between Coppola’s The Conversation and Antonioni’s Blow-Up with the political thriller/conspiracy tropes of All the President’s Men. Though classics in their own right, they’re missing the one key ingredient that defines the heart and vulnerability of Blow Out, which is peak John Travolta. He plays a sound engineer for an exploitation film company in Philadelphia who had recorded by accident the audio of a political assassination when a car’s tire is blown out, which sends it into a lake. Normally detached from reality by way of instruments, his character is sent into the water and saves the young woman trapped inside the car but not the politician, who was clearly already dead. Because of his growing attraction for the woman and to right a previous wrong that got an undercover agent killed, he obsesses over uncovering the truth of what happened, which had been covered up for convenient political reasons.
Whereas Hoffman and Redford in similar roles played the parts with expertly precise acting, Travolta and co-lead Nancy Allen lend the performances an inescapable charm that, along with De Palma’s skill in directing thrillers, sucks the viewer into the story for the entire runtime. And whereas Coppola with Conversation uses the actual medium of film to create the style/content of the story, De Palma takes it a step further in its use of exploiting objectivity through film equipment at the mercy of subjectivity and what larger implications that may have. And lastly, Antonioni’s Blow-Up is given an update through Blow Out in the latter’s use of both sound and image to uncover the truth rather than just the image, which shows the full capacity to which sound plays in the construction of filmed narrative in its collaboration with the image.
The film holds up considerably well, even with outdated sound design technology playing a major part in moving the plot along. I recently heard Tarantino say that this is one of his favorite films of all time from an interview in the nineties, which he maintains almost thirty years later now. And for good reasons, this film feels as fresh as any of the easily rewatchable New Hollywood classics that continue to play a significant influence in American film history.
Essay: Blurring the Line. by Kambole Campbell
The boundary between live-action and animation is nowadays ultra-thin due to CGI and audiences increasingly brought up on realistic video games. Look no further than Disney’s recent live-action outputs, most notably the 2019 remakes of Dumbo and The Lion King, which take place in realistic environments but with completely animated main characters. Both of these films were panned by critics in relation to their animated originals, but that didn’t stop the films from making over a combined $2 billion worldwide.
But before this proliferation of animated films pretending to be live-action (and vice versa), the particular genre of the live-action/animation hybrid was the norm. With the recent release of Space Jam: A New Legacy, Kambole Campbell wrote a piece for Letterboxd describing this hybrid genre. Generally speaking:
The live-action and animation hybrid movie is something of a dicey prospect. It’s tricky to create believable interaction between what’s real and what’s drawn, puppeteered or rendered—and blending the live and the animated has so far resulted in wild swings in quality. It is a highly specific and technically demanding niche, one with only a select few major hits, though plenty of cult oddities. So what makes a good live-action/animation hybrid?
Campbell waits until the end to answer this question. While giving a history of the hybrid genre, he argues:
more contemporary efforts seek to subvert this feeling of harmony and control, instead embracing the chaos of two worlds colliding, the cartoons there to shock rather than sing.
On one of the two most popular film’s doing this:
The absurdity behind the collision of the drawn and the real is never better embodied than in another of our highest-rated live/animated hybrids. Released in 1988, Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit shows off a deep understanding—narratively and aesthetically—of the material that it’s parodying, seeking out the impeccable craftsmanship of legends such as director of animation Richard Williams (1993’s The Thief and the Cobbler), and his close collaborator Roy Naisbitt. The forced perspectives of Naisbitt’s mind-bending layouts provide much of the rocket fuel driving the film’s madcap cartoon opening.
Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, Roger Rabbit utilizes the Disney stable of characters as well as the Looney Tunes cast to harken back to America’s golden age of animation. It continues a familiar scenario where the ’toons themselves are autonomous actors (as also seen in Friz Freleng’s 1940 short You Ought to Be in Pictures, in which Daffy Duck convinces Porky Pig to try his acting luck in the big studios).
Through this conceit, Zemeckis is able to celebrate the craft of animation, while pastiching both Chinatown, the noir genre, and the mercenary nature of the film industry (“the best part is… they work for peanuts!” a studio exec says of the cast of Fantasia). As Eddie Valiant, Bob Hoskins’ skepticism and disdain towards “toons” is a giant parody of Disney’s more traditional approach to matching humans and drawings.
Adult audiences are catered for with plenty of euphemistic humor and in-jokes about the history of the medium. It’s both hilarious (“they… dropped a piano on him,” one character solemnly notes of his son) and just the beginning of Hollywood toying with feature-length stories in which people co-exist with cartoons, rather than dipping in and out of fantasy sequences. It’s not just about how the cartoons appear on the screen, but how the human world reacts to them, and Zemeckis gets a lot of mileage out of applying ’toon lunacy to our world.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which enjoys strong critical and general audience ratings, works because of its meta-genre usage: a live-action noir film that comments on its noir tropes while also being an animated film that comments on its animation tropes. But the important point is that it doesn’t lean too heavily on these tropes in telling its story, which was the fault of others like it.
Campbell offers his thesis on the subject by answering his question from the beginning:
Craft is of course important, but generally speaking, maybe nowadays a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium’s history is the thing that makes successful live-action/animation hybrids click. It’s an idea that doesn’t lend itself to being too cool, or even entirely palatable. The trick is to be as fully dotty as Mary Poppins, or steer into the gaucheness of the concept, à la Roger Rabbit and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
It’s quite a tightrope to walk between good meta-comedy and a parade of references to intellectual property. The winningest strategy is to weave the characters into the tapestry of the plot and let the gags grow from there, rather than hoping their very inclusion is its own reward.
But the question now is, will the schlock of this genre continue indefinitely or is it possible to reach other Mary Poppins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the future? Or in other words, will the modern technology of CGI allow for the subtle use of animated objects in a live-action world without becoming too self-referential in the process?
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