The Florida Project [Q & A with Willem DaFoe]

This has been on my radar for a while, it opened back in October at the nearest art house theater, but I was unable to make it over in time to catch it before it went away. Fortunately, with some Oscar buzz and awards season all around us, the lucky opportunities crop up here in the L.A. area on a frequent basis. We got an email from the American Cinematique that they were holding a screening at the Egyptian and that Willem DaFoe would be on hand for a Q and A. Here is where I love technology, I bought tickets within three minutes on line and we were set.

In what feels like a Cinema Verite film, "The Florida Project" follows the life of a child, living on the edge of poverty and being destitute. Moonee is six, it is summertime, and Disneyworld is almost next door. That sounds like heaven for a child but the truth of this story is that dreams are not always as close as we want them to be. Moonee's Mom is Halley, a women who seems to have no plans or purpose. She seems to be getting by on some sort of assistance and an entrepreneurial use of wholesale perfume that she can purchase at a discount. They live in a budget motel that sits among the commercial pilot fish businesses surrounding the Magic Kingdom.  Far from being a downer however, "The Florida Project" is full of the exuberance of  childhood innocence. Moonee is not a particularly likable kid. Like her mother, she has little respect for those who don't go her way and she has a mouth to match. That however does not make her bad, but it does show that she needs a lot more attention and a better role model than she is getting.

Actor Willem DaFoe plays Bobby, the manager of the hotel. He is the one professional actor in the cast, everyone else is just getting started or is playing a close version of themselves. They are all very good but DaFoe holds things together in spite of being a somewhat peripheral character to the main events. The ragtag community that seems to have developed in the motels in the area is greatly enhanced by Bobby's tolerance of the characters, despite his frequently justified exasperation with them.

One of the things that came up in the discussion after the film last night was the script. The movie often feels improvised and as a result very realistic. DaFoe was adamant that there was indeed a script and that is largely what was shot, but he also said that the kids were encouraged to "play act" the way they thought the scenes would work. Kids do and say things spontaneously, and a lot of that ends up being kept in the film along with the original actions and dialogue.  It seems obvious that this is especially true of the scenes with the kids. There is no way they could have been memorizing those lines and performing the way they did while still coming off so naturally. Brooklynn Prince is a fireball of a personality and she clearly injects Moonee with personality plus.

The actor did mention that the sequence with the ice machine was developed after the film had been started. It is so subtle, you might not be aware that the second character is supposed to be Bobby's son. It was a small touch to the film to help establish that the character of Bobby had a background that was not all that different from some of the tenants of the hotel.

Bria Vinaite plays the Mom who clearly loves her child but is not very well prepared to take care of her. She draws out the belligerence of the character while also imbuing her with a sense of love and caring for her daughter. Watching the story, it is likely that you will feel frustrated so often with these two. Moonee can be excused because she is a kid and doesn't always understand the nature of her own actions. Halley though is an adult and she just can't seem to put things into a perspective that seems adult like. DaFoe revealed that during some scenes, Director Sean Baker had Vinaite wearing an earpiece and gave her directions when the camera was far back from the scene. Many of the episodes where she is selling perfume to the tourists involved him directing her from across the street.

This movie shows friendships that are built and those that are destroyed and some that just abruptly end because of the circumstances. For the kids, it involves a little heartache and at the end of the movie, Moonee and her recently acquired best friend Jancey appear in a scene that may be real or may be fantasy. Someone directly asked that question of DaFoe last night and like a true artist he shrugged his shoulders and said "you tell me."
                                 

Willem DaFoe is frequently mentioned as a contender for the Supporting Actor Award at this years Oscars, and certainly this was his reason for making the appearance. The show was sold out and while the movie received a warm reaction from the audience, it was the actor who the crowd seemed most responsive to. I'd say a good 80% of the time was spent on "the Florida Project" but several other roles and films were mentioned as well. I was most interested to learn that Wes Anderson's approach to two of the films he made with the actor were completely different. "The Life Aquatic" was much looser and while not really improvisational, Anderson allowed the actors huge latitudes in how the dialogue and characterless played out. On the other hand, DaFoe described the animatics that Anderson had created for "The Grand Budapest Hotel", including voices and dialogue done by Anderson himself. DaFoe laughed and said it could easily have been released in that form, the attention to detail was so thoroughly planned. 


My overall impression of "The Florida Project" is positive with some reservations. It does meander a lot. There are elements that are very sad which sometimes seem to be glossed over. The actions of the Mom and Daughter seem to be real and reflect their point in life, but that does not make them forgivable, only understandable. 

In Praise of Physical Media

I am a realist, I am not blind to what I see coming with the technology available now and in the immediate future. I have plenty of students who don't watch anything on network TV. Most have never seen a Laser Disc, few an LP and soon, the small number who remember VHS will grow to be called "old".  My daughter went to a sale at a Barnes and Noble that was closing, and she heard an eight year old ask when he saw a tool for opening a CD, "What's a CD?" The times they are a changing.

At the start of the year, one of the "Old Movie Weirdos" that I follow on twitter and Facebook [both of which are already severely dated from the millennial perspective] shared this little incident at the close of the previous year.

Streaming is the present, I'm not sure what the future is, but I know there are things about the past that we are going to miss and it makes me a little sad. The past is not dead just yet however and there were two examples of physical media that came into my life in the last few weeks that I wanted to share and praise.

"Stranger Things" is a TV Series that appears on Netflix, so it is readily stream-able for anyone interested who subscribes to the service. It does seem however that someone out there is a genius at marketing because my daughter got a gift for me at Christmas that is so meta, it should be studied in communication schools around the country. I received Season 1 of Stranger Things as a a Blu Ray set, but it is packaged in the most amazingly appropriate manner imaginable.  The show is set in 1984, at the start of the Home Video Revolution. VHS had defeated Beta as the format for home video and it stood astride the home entertainment market place like a colossus, about to get even bigger. So what could be more retro/meta/perfect than packaging this 2016 product as an eighties piece of merchandise?

 That's right my friends, it is delivered to you in a VHS style box. Complete with the details that most of us from an older
generation remember from a thousand trips to the video store.  There is a color coded sticker on the cover so that the crew at your video store [well before Blockbuster in 1984] will be able to restock it in the right place. Down on the corner there are some details about the "tape" specifications.

Please notice that your VHS is in hi-fi, so you can hook it up to your audio receiver and listen to it loud. Don't neglect to examine the details on the back cover for more information but also for a perfect replication of the design of those boxes. Including the FBI warning that was so ubiquitous. Just this alone should justify owning this in physical form. How would you enjoy all the retro references and nostalgia without it. But as they used to say in the infomercials of the day, don't answer yet , because you also get...

the inside of the VHS box, a container for the DVDs that will make you laugh and cry simultaneously for your long lost youth. 

 That's right, the container box is a cardboard duplicate of a VHS tape, with a window on the tape box and another sticker. This one tells you to "Be Kind, Rewind". Because returning your tape without rewinding it was rude and often resulted in an extra fee. Now streamers may have access to their material on any device and be able to watch wherever there is an internet connection available to them, but they will miss out on the tangible goodies that often came with old school media. I had Kiss albums that included a Toy Pop Gun, a multi-part puzzle, and most came with some kind of poster as well. The people who put this box together did not forget you.

Located on the inside of the box lid is a pocket containing an "exclusive" Stranger Things mini poster. Available only to those who purchased this Video copy.  I'm sorry, but that is just the kind of catnip that will get a hoarder like me to bite. When the E.T. VHS came out, you could be assured it was "official" if the lifting cover on the tape was gree rather than black. That dumb piece of merchandising probably sold them an extra million copies so that people could keep one pristine. 

OK, I know it is marketing that is yanking me in to make this purchase, but it was inexpensive, and worth twice what my daughter paid. (She actually bought one for herself as well.)

The second piece of marketing that makes an old guy like me appreciate physical media is something I have been enamored with for just over a year now. I still have nearly a thousand Laser Discs that I treasure and try to display. If you watch the video at the start of this post, you will see a sort of "Un-Boxing" of the Classic Jaws Laser Disc release. We made that at least six years ago but it shows you how a format that had been dead for more than a decade still held fascination for me. Well last year, Disney did some marketing for Great Britain that is not available here yet. They have "Big Sleeve Editions" of their Bu-Ray/DVD releases, that mimic the old Laser Disc packaging. 

The drawback of these products is that the DVD is region coded so that they will not work on most U.S. players, but the Blu Rays work just fine. In addition to the 12" covers, the jackets have a beautiful interior gatefold to show off additional artwork. There is an exterior sleeve with a mirror front edge to match the front cover, but when you take off the sleeve, the specifications disappear and another nice image is made available. Each disc comes with four special 12" image inserts that make the package even more special. 

Yesterday, after searching ebay and converting dollars into pounds, I obtained a "Big Sleeve Edition" of the most recent Guardians of the Galaxy film. 

Look at these images and reveille in the joy of thoughtful marketing for film enthusiasts. 

The Back cover without the sleeve.

And now the contents which yield a bounty of fun for obsessive fans and collectors. 

There is a three song vinyl ep with songs from the score and the final credits. Just the kind of bonus to attract people who still think owning something tangible is more pleasurable than visiting something that you don't really possess. 

This is one of the four art inserts and it would be enough by itself to get my blood hot for this sort of product. This is just too much fun, and I can't understand why we want the future to come and take it all away from us. 

Lambcast Movie of the Month: Ishtar

KAMAD hosts the MOTM on the Lambcast. The show features a looonnng trivia game of my creation but the length has more to do with how much fun everyone is having than any complexity to the game. 

Unboxing Video of 007 Box

I suppose it seems a little odd to give yourself a gift at Christmas. In truth, I'd ordered it as soon as I saw it and it just happened to arrive before the holiday. I waited until after the new year to really open it and examine the contents. 007 fans will enjoy, everyone else I hope you will tolerate.