Sleeping Beauty-Paramount's Summer Classic Films Series

 

In a complete turnaround from the previous night's Rocky Horror extravaganza, the Paramount had this Walt Disney Classic Scheduled, complete with Princess Aurora in the lobby to take pictures with for all the little princesses who came to the screening. Amanda was wearing her Sleeping Beauty dress, but I could not convince her to pose with Aurora. 

Disney's Sleeping Beauty was the last of the strictly hand drawn animation films, other processes using different technologies have followed. It is a fabulous looking movie with vivid colors, detailed backgrounds and  characters with very distinctive features. The three fairies  Flora, Fauna and Merryweather are delightful in their differences, and the color scheme becomes a running joke in the film, which ties them to the vision of the movie as well as the plot. 

In fact, the good fairies are really the main characters in the movie even though there is a love story and a hero. Merryweather is able to change the evil spell that Maleficent, an evil fairy has cast, so that it is sleep rather than death which ensnares the princess. The fairies are the ones who take the princess as an infant and hide her. When they discover that the young man that Briar Rose (Aurora) has fallen in love with, it is they who come to his rescue when he is captured by Maleficent. They give him weapons to fight her and cast spells to assist him. Aurora and Prince Phillip are almost secondary characters to the story of the fairies.

The film uses a score adapted from the Tchaikovsky's ballet "Sleeping Beauty." The music then feels completely familiar. The main theme which becomes the song "Once Upon a Dream" is lovely and very recognizable, even for neophytes of the ballet world. The style of the castles seems to be authentic of mediaeval European eras but my guess is that is was most closely based on the castle that was already at Disneyland and called Sleeping Beauty's castle, even before the film was finished.  

Maleficent is an evil and compelling villain and her look was so effective that when the reimagining of fairy tales fad took over a few years ago, she was a natural. I did not really think it was needed, and I am happy with this iteration of her character. The animals in the film are well used, including three birds who reflect the colors of the good fairies and the raven which is Maleficent's familiar. The two kings are great contrasts visually, one being stout and the other quite lean. 

Just as an aside, this is one of the most beautiful LaserDisc packages of a movie. 

TCM Film Festival 10th Anniversary Recap--Day Two

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Although I've seen this film several times before, my daughter had not and it is one of those essential film experiences so this was a choice for Friday morning. The screening was hosted by the Eddie Muller, the TCM Czar of Noir, and let's face it, "Postman" is the prototypical noir. John Garfield is a genial drifter who happens into a job at a roadside diner. The wife of the proprietor is played by Lana Turner and the sparks immediately begin to fly. Suddenly, sex and murder are in the air and romance makes a root for two people who kill a genial old man for being in their way.

Like many classic films, you do have to accept some dramatic flair that goes along with the plot. The audience is supposed to laugh a bit at the cop who sympathizes so much with a cat that is collateral damage in the scheme, but it goes on a bit more than contemporary audiences will be used to, and it is the screenplay and direction that ends up being the source of mirth in the end.  The story is also pretty convoluted with double crosses and reversals galore. Frank and Cora are a little too clever for their own good, but they are not more clever than the D.A. or their own attorney.  There are too many trips to the hospital, accidental encounters with cops and nefarious background characters to keep track of. I think the film is vastly entertaining. My daughter enjoyed it but thought is was way too long and that the plot reversals go a bit too far at times.

There is little doubt that this is the film that most people will remember Lana Turner for. Although she was nominated for an Academy Award for "Peyton Place", that melodrama is largely a misty memory for most. Her appearance here in the white shorts and the turban, is iconic and a reveal that will echo for decades down through other films like "Dr. No" and "Body Heat". The house was packed and everyone seemed to have a grand time with this quintessential noir thriller.

Sleeping Beauty

This Walt Disney Masterpiece is Amanda's favorite "Princess" film [as you should be able to tell by her wardrobe choice this day],so naturally we stuck around to
see it in the same theater we started the day in. The meticulous drawings of the characters and the vivid background make this one of the most beautiful animated films you are ever likely to encounter. The host for the discussion was author Mindy Johnson, who wrote a fantastic book on the women of the golden age of animation that we bought last year and had signed by all of the guests on last year's panel. 

Her two guests this day were Jane Baer and Floyd Norman, two artists who worked on the film. Both of these guests were well into their eighties but had vivid memories of working on the project. Baer remembers doing the flames on the candles of the falling birthday cake, although she was not sure if her work was used or if other artists work was preferred. Norman was graciously polite by offering that the women animators where better at the facial details of the characters and that their work exceeded that of most of the men on the project.

Some nice photos of the guests in their time working on the project were shared with the audience and produced the requisite aaahs from the audience. 

Academy Conversations: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Not only is one of my favorite films of all time being screened at the festival, it is featured in the Academy Conversations program, which is always one of the best features at the TCM Film Festival. This year is extra special because the two perennial hosts of this series, Ben Burtt and Craig Barron, both worked on the film. So in addition to the archives they were able to raid for information and picture, they have a treasure trove of personal stories and photos to add to the presentation. I may go a little overboard in covering this event, but it was hard to resist all the details that we were being given. Burtt is the Academy Award winning sound designer and he made substantial contributions to this particular movie. In fact one of the Academy Awards he possess is for this film. Barron was almost a newby by comparison. His one previous film was "the Empire Strikes Back".  Both of these veterans of ILM are respected experts in their fields.  The very first presentation at a TCMFF that I attended was their presentation on "The Adventures of Robin Hood", which just so happens to be my favorite film. 

The whole Indiana Jones mythology is deeply rooted in the serials and B pictures of the 1930s and 40s. There was an elaborate comparison of pictures from some of those films to the images that ended up in Raiders and some of the subsequent sequels. The truck chase for instance was right out of an old Zorro serial, and the whip work is also cleverly mimicked in the movie. They showed some behind the scenes photos of them as young men working on the film, these shots were highly entertaining.

Even the sound of the whip is a complicated process as you can see from the clip above. Nothing in a movie is exactly what you expect it to be, and the additional sound that Burtt talks about here takes the scene up a notch. Another illustration that he provided concerned the gunshots and ricochets heard in the gun battles. 

Depending on the environment in which it was being recorded, the gunshots come across as mild whistling sounds or booming blasts from a cannon. To get the ricochets, they fired along a dirt road in the desert, with a series of microphones along the path to pick up a distinctive echo effect. 

The sound of an egg being peeled was used to make the crackling noise as a desiccated corpse turns toward Marion when they are escaping from the "Well of Souls".  Ben Burtt  also explained how he was inspired even as a kid by sound effects. The class clown in his elementary school would take a ruler, slide it partially off the desktop and then pull it up and release to make a repeating twang sound. Burtt used this school day technique to create the sounds of the darts in the opening sequence of Raiders.

Craig Barron revealed some of the secrets for the visual effects, including the elaborate fishtank used to film oil and cloudy water together in different gradients to produce the well known cloud effects found in several early Spielberg films, including "Close Encounters" and "Poltergeist."

 Of course the days of matte paintings and rear projection are largely behind us due to advances in Computer generated images, but it was not so long ago that they were the height of visual miracles in films. The example Barron shared is maybe one of the most famous end shots of all film history. The crated Ark of the Covenant is rolled down an aisle between dozens of other crates and as the camera pulls back, a warehouse full of similar crates is revealed, suggesting that the Ark is about to be lost again. 

The team created blocks of wood as models for the artists to follow. A actual set of crates on either side is filmed with the Ark crate being rolled down the aisle and then the matte work is added to give the impression of an enormous room filled with similar looking boxes. 

With the Famous Real "Indiana"

These two also did a presentation on Tarzan and His Mate for the festival, but that conflicted with another program that we wanted to see. If you ever get a chance to see them at work, be sure to take advantage of it. 

As a side note, this was the program where I stumbled walking up the aisle of the Chinese Theater and took a tumble on the landing between the front and back sections of the theater. I was less worried about my dignity than I was about the impact I had on my righjt leg which began to stiffen up later that evening and threatened my mobility for the rest of the festival. It all worked out, but for a few hours I thought I might have to see a doctor this week, and not Dr. Jones. 

Day For Night

I have a number of blind spots in my film going background and a lot of them are made up of foreign language films. I knew the name of Francois Truffaut from back in the day, even though I'd never seen any of his films. Of course he was recognizable to me from his role in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". This Academy Award winning Best Foreign Language film has been a movie that I looked forward to seeing for years. I even knew the reference that the title makes well before I knew anything else about the film. 

The host for the program was again Eddie Muller, who basically identified this as the movie which cemented his desire to be a part of the film industry in some capacity. His guest was the International Star of the film Jaqueline Bisset. This is a woman who has accurately been described as one of the most beautiful women to grace the screen. In person, she lived up to that praise. She was also loquacious and honest in sharing her story about the film and the actors she worked with. 

It turned out that the film is one of the highlights of the festival for me. It was completely charming and full of the kinds of behind the camera sorts of details about movie making that make the subject so interesting to all of us. The performances were first rate and the movie is very funny at times. I did not realize that there were going to be so many comic elements to it. This may have been Amanda's favorite film of the Festival as well. 

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

This was a sentimental favorite to close out the second day of the festival. The program was hosted by Michael uslan, a prolific film producer and fan of classic movies. He mostly told stories about the actors in the film and about the original production's history. He also briefly mentioned to remake featuring Peter O'Toole, but the focus was on this 1939 classic. This is the performance that won Robert Donat his Academy award, famously beating out Clark Gable's iconic appearance i "Gone With the Wind".

The storytelling is a little old fashioned from the perspective of mu daughter, and frankly I think I understand what she means. Somethings do not get well explained and the passage of time is often shown in a way that might be parodied by a modern film. It all still works but the film does feel a bit longer than necessary. At nearly two hours it does try to encapsulate several decades in the life of our title character.  Greer Garson is terrific in the film, but she is probably only in it for about forty minutes in the middle and we will miss her substantially in the back half of the movie. 

This was our longest day at the festival and while watching the film, my leg started tightening up as a result of the fall I had earlier. I limped back to the car, and Amanda was worried that I could not drive home but I was fine. Luckily, a nice dose of Advil helped me get to sleep. So I finished the evening with more "Goodnight Mr. Slips" than I wanted. 

Maleficent

Disney is doing it's darndest to exploit all their properties and keep us entertained at the same time. A traditional retelling of "Sleeping Beauty" could have worked fine, just as the live action "101 Dalmatians" did a dozen or so years ago. Somewhere in the bowels of the Imagineering Department or in the Production agreement with big movie stars, someone has decided that a straight remake is not cool, and a story needs to be tweaked to make it fresh. The best known example of this in the recent past has been the musical "Wicked". A couple of years ago, Disney re-imagined "Alice in Wonderland". Now it is time for a classic fairy tale to get it's own variation and they have chosen one with a great villainess which makes the visualization a handy shortcut to the story.

There is a great deal to admire about this movie. I thought the opening section in which the character of "Maleficent" is introduced in her child form was really marvelous. The character was appealing and there is a nice romantic edge to the story line that is being developed. The character of Stephan however, is not quite as nicely developed and it was hard to see the conflicting choices he was faced with until the key scenes in the movie. The character development here was incomplete which makes some of the plotting a little muddled. Although a conflict between the two worlds was suggested in the narration, we are not really shown any of that except in a direct combat scene. One side is immediately presented as evil and as a result, they lose any interest as part of the story. A whole Kingdom becomes a cardboard cutout villain. The movie shows armies and battles but nothing that would back up the need or desire for those battles.

My daughter has watched "Once Upon a Time" and we have both seen "Frozen" so the twist in the movie is not as great as it should be. I liked it pretty well but she feels that it is almost becoming a contemporary cliche. The movie is aggressively unromantic and that trend may reflect blowback from all the years that Disney has been accused of brainwashing little girls about "true love" and the handsome prince. The switch in tone is meant to appeal to more modern audiences and ways of thinking, but it feels like something of the magic is being lost by doing this. The outcome does differ from tradition and while that might sometimes be appealing, it does feel strange when being thrust upon a story like this. In a way it makes the calculation of changing the character focus even more noticeable.

Angelina Jolie was obviously perfectly cast in the movie. She almost has the high cheekbones without the prosthetic and special effects makeup. Her eyes do a lot of the acting in the movie but her voice is also used exceptionally well. She is the main reason to see the film. She appears to be invested in telling the story and selling her performance. She has two emotional transformations that she has to pull off and both of them succeed pretty well. The second one is more subtle and takes up much of the storyline but it feels solid because it is allowed to play out. You can see the turn coming, but you can also believe that it might not get here, That is the value of her performance. It is a bit disconcerting that the bad guy has to be the hero and the reverse happens as well. I hope that the desire to tell traditional stories doesn't require us to subvert what came before every time. I'm willing to go along today because of the casting and performance, but screenwriters should be careful about going to that well too frequently.

This may have been a film where the 3D process would be worth seeing. I saw it in a regular two dimensional form and the edges of characters looked soft and artificial to me. I saw several spots where the extra dimensionality would be exciting in the scene, and make the events in those sequences more dynamic. The creatures of the moors that Maleficent is the de-facto queen over look a bit cartoonish and sometimes silly. There are long sequences where the beauty of the woods is supposed to be a marvel but it just looks conventional and weak. The best live comparison I could think of to make was Ridley Scott's "Legend". The enchanted forest in that film looked more real on the sets than anything in this CGI wonderland that has been created for the character here to inhabit.

You may notice that I've said nothing about Sleeping Beauty herself. Elle Fanning is a good actress, she was great in "Super 8" a couple of years ago. She is fine in this film but there is so little to her part that almost any pretty young actress would have been fine in the role. It has to be a thankless task to star in a fairy tale as the princess who is subject to a curse, and end up playing second fiddle to a character that might be mostly defined by her horns. The three good faeries are played strictly for laughs and between them and King Stephan, there is no emotional investment in what goes on with Aurora. There is more to say but it is late and I've been busy this weekend as you will see if you visit the other blog.  I may come back and add some more to this review but for now i can say it was an interesting experience that I can't quite warm up to, but did admire at times.