Since his inception almost eight decades ago, the character of Conan the Barbarian has inspired countless different stories spanning across all manner of media, so it’s not really a surprise that the new Lionsgate big screen re-boot of the Conan film series would involve more than one writer. While Sean Hood polished up the production draft and worked with director Marcus Nispel, Joshua Oppenheimer, along with his writing partner Thomas Dean Donnelly, crafted the original framework of the story, and retains screenplay credit. Recently, I had a chance to speak to the screenwriter one-on-one, about the enduring appeal of the character of Conan, the absolute necessity of thick skin when working as a Hollywood screenwriter, and the state of one of his next big projects, the script for the movie adaptation of Voltron. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, fun read.
Daily Archives: August 18, 2011
Imogen Poots Talks Fright Night, More
You can often chart the rise of a young actor or actress by the on-screen company they keep, in which case British-born Imogen Poots is doing more than fine. Having come off a film with Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken and Philip Seymour Hoffman, she now stars alongside Colin Farrell and Anton Yelchin in Fright Night, playing the latter’s sweet girlfriend, and an unwitting object of temptation for the former. In films like the striking and austere schoolhouse drama Cracks (the directorial debut of Jordan Scott, daughter of Ridley Scott), meanwhile, and last year’s Solitary Man, in which she hooked up with Michael Douglas, Poots is showing a range that obviously endears her to casting directors and filmmakers alike.
With Fright Night, though, the 22-year-old actress has a potentially huge commercial hit-in-waiting, which makes it an exciting but nerve-racking time. I recently had a chance to chat one-on-one with Poots — an avowed music fan, of Leonard Cohen, The Smiths and doo-wop tunes, among other genres — about crafting (and keeping) an American accent, the proper pronunciation of her name, what academic disciplines she hopes to one day study, and how she’ll be delving even further into music in her next project. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
Above-the-line stars get most of the credit and glory for Hollywood successes, but dozens if not hundreds of other specially gifted artisans labor on most big-budget productions, often going their entire careers without so much as an acknowledged tip of the proverbial cap from the moviegoing public at large. Craig McCall’s fascinating documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, then, attempts to right this wrong, shining a light on its namesake subject, who in March, 2001 — more than five decades after winning his first Academy Award, for his stunning work on Black Narcissus — became the first cinematographer ever presented with an honorary Oscar, for his exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences.
After getting his start as first a “clapper boy” and then a camera assistant for a string of quick-shoot quota pictures, many of the British-born Cardiff’s gifts were rooted in his extraordinary touch with Technicolor, honed through work with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on the groundbreaking A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and then The Red Shoes. While he lacked a formal education and wasn’t the most technically proficient, Cardiff’s lifelong love of painting, and more specifically his astonishing, virtually peerless ability to communicate mood through lighting, quickly won him a legion of filmmaker fans. From Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Henry Hathaway, Laurence Olivier, Alan Parker and many more, Cardiff worked with highly skilled directors spanning seven decades, and even helmed more than dozen feature films himself.
Actors whom he beautifully lit (including Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Lauren Bacall and Kim Hunter) sit to sing Cardiff’s praises, and many more with whom Cardiff worked (including Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn) are glimpsed in photographs and on-set home video footage from his private collection. The most edifying interviewees, however, prove to be Cardiff’s fellow behind-the-camera craftsman, including peers and colleagues like Freddie Francis and Richard Fleischer. None other than Martin Scorsese also pops up, crediting Cardiff’s subjective work on The Red Shoes as a major inspiration for the boxing scenes in his Raging Bull.
Cameraman director McCall has an obvious affection for his subject (several times he’s glimpsed on screen alongside Cardiff, always smiling adoringly), and his passion for the most part is infectious. In letting Cardiff (who was still mentally sharp as a tack until his death at 94 years of age in 2009) basically narrate his own story, McCall is the beneficiary of a wide variety of amazing and delightful anecdotes, ranging from Marlene Dietrich’s intimate knowledge of lighting and Ava Gardner’s insecurities to how the crew of The African Queen was gripped with dysentery, and why Humphrey Bogart and the aforementioned Huston were the only ones immune.
If there’s a strike against the picture, it’s that it unfolds in a very linear and somewhat unimaginative fashion. Cameraman lacks a real spine, and doesn’t delve at all into Cardiff’s (doubtlessly fascinating) personal life. More about what shaped him in his young, formative years (there’s one scene that touches on this, but it seems the tip of an iceberg), as well as how Cardiff coped for so long with the itinerant lifestyle of a cinematographer and director, would have given McCall’s movie a much-needed extra dimensionality. Regardless, as is, Cameraman is a captivating look back at a transitory time — before basically all movies were made in color — when camerawork was slightly more welded to the emotion of the material, and used unabashedly to heighten the effect of genre elements. That Cardiff’s unique role in this era, and spanning into the periods that both preceded and followed it, finally receives its own recognition is indeed a special thing.
Separated into a dozen chapters and presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, Cameraman comes to DVD with a nice complement of supplemental material. An interview with director McCall from June 2010 by Ian Christie runs14 minutes, and tells of the filmmaker’s first meeting with his subject-to-be (they bonded over a Bolex camera), as well as other anecdotes. There is also a clutch of photo galleries, including many of Cardiff’s portraits of the actresses with whom he worked, and 10 minutes of Cardiff watching some of his behind-the-scenes movies from the set of The African Queen and the like — the latter at least a generation before lightweight cameras made such off-the-cuff cinematic capturing all the rage. Eleven minutes of extra interview material featuring filmmakers like Alan Parker and Christopher Challis discussing the important nature of the cinematographer-director relationship are also included, and a five-minute segment on three-strip Technicolor highlights the stringent measures the company’s color-control department in safeguarding their technology and rare cameras. A collection of trailers for Cameraman and a quartet of other Strand releases rounds out the release. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)
ShockYa DVD Column, August 18
In my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I take a second look at Paul Bettany’s Priest, recoil at memories of the soul-sucking Hoodwinked Too! and ogle the chests of Colin Farrell and Christina Lindberg, one of which I enjoy more than the other. To find out which, click here and give the column a spin over at ShockYa.
Darwin: No Services Ahead
What would possess a person to stay and live in (or move to) a small, dusty town in the scorching Death Valley region of California, with a population of 35? That question is at the heart of Nick Brandestini’s Darwin: No Services Ahead, about a same-named, dried-up burgh at the end of a weathered road on the outskirts on a nearby mountain range where the government tests top-secret weapons. A unique and in some respects staggering work, Darwin is an involving portrait of people propelled from society by various tragic turns, and yet also curiously bound together by their estrangement.
When, in the spring of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was captured on audiotape making comments about small towns whose jobs had dried up and vanished, and were thus characterized by a populace with antipathy toward outsiders or those different than them, and clinging to guns and religion, he was in theory speaking about rural Rust Belt voters, but there are certainly significant overlaps with some of the denizens of Darwin. The remarkable thing about Brandestini’s humanizing movie, though — which also recalls David Lynch’s web-produced Interview Project, co-directed by his son Austin — is that it doesn’t sit in superior judgment of them, even as it slowly reveals some of their cracked and warped thinking.
Monty Brannigan, a salty ex-miner who’s lived in the town for almost 60 years and is old enough to remember its wild(er) roots (after several openings and closings, the mine shuttered for good in 1977), lives in as much of an unexamined cocoon as he can with his second wife, Nancy, estranged from his two adult children. Hank and Connie Jones, a couple with seven previous marriages between them, give occasional town tours, and take care of Connie’s transsexual “son,” Ryal, and his partner, who are contemplating a move. Susan Pimentel holds the town’s one real job, as postmaster. (Michael Laemmle, meanwhile, the grand-nephew of Universal Studios co-founder Carl Laemmle, oversees the 55,000-gallon water tank and single-pipe, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains and serves as Darwin’s literal lifeline.) These and other interesting characters serve as a reminder that certain pockets of America are not for the hearty and hale, but for people — consciously or not — looking to avoid or run away from something.
Brandestini doesn’t load up his movie with fancy directorial gimmickry, or even prod his interview subjects with a seemingly specific agenda, instead leaning on an ethereal Southwestern-inflected score from composer Michael Brook for mood and just letting them talk. The skillfully edited result is fairly remarkable. A history of the town emerges first; its namesake was Dr. Erasmus Darwin French, a U.S. Army deserter who headed west during the Gold Rush and spent years (unsuccessfully) mining in the area. When silver was discovered nearby in 1874, the town briefly boomed, achieving its peak population of 3,500 in 1877. Then, in a roundabout way, colorful unseen supporting characters are illuminated through survivor’s memories. One Darwin dweller who passed in 2003, Greville Healey, lived in a hollowed-out metal water tank, having been “banned” from living in a home (trailer) after burning two of them down while falling asleep with lit cigarettes.
Finally, of course, the characters themselves come into crisper focus — with edifying details and sometimes shocking stories about their pasts, and ruminations (spoken and sometimes editorially implied) on what’s drawn them to and/or kept them in Darwin. There are few explicitly religious zealots in the mix (fistfights or the threat thereof seem more likely to broker peace than the blessed holy scripture), but more than a handful of Darwin residents confess a belief in apocalyptic, doomsday scenarios. To that end, one gentleman leaves a variety of loaded handguns, rifles and shotguns scattered around his home; another, for reasons unclear, has buried his guns outside of his trailer, in the desert. It’s fascinating and more than a little moving to contemplate the histories and dilemmas of all these people. They are by degrees damaged souls, yes, but in their basic needs not so different from you or I. (Nick Brandestini Productions, unrated, 86 minutes)
Writer Sean Hood Talks Conan the Barbarian
The character of Conan the Barbarian has, since two big screen offerings in the 1980s that helped launch the acting career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, been something of a dormant volcano. Periodically, there would be rumblings as to a big new movie (especially before Schwarzenegger became “The Governator” of California) or franchise reimagining, but as with so many would-be projects in Hollywood, the elements never quite completely aligned in a manner that turned possibility into a reality. That all changes this week, of course, with the debut of Lionsgate’s Conan the Barbarian, starring Games of Thrones‘ Jason Momoa in the title role.
Recently, I had the chance to sit down in person and speak one-on-one with some of the cast and crew about their takes on the material, and the long shadow of its legacy. And what better place to start than with one of the writers who was charged with shepherding the character back to the screen — even if screenwriter Sean Hood (above), who also currently teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, jokingly couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to chat with him. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click on over for the engaging Q&A read, which includes intriguing information about Hood’s new project, which he compares to The Black Swan.
Conan the Barbarian
The latest big screen iteration in a character that has held a grip on fan imagination for almost eight decades, Conan the Barbarian is a full-bodied piece of throwback sword-and-sorcery entertainment that dutifully meets its target-demographic quotients for nudity and violence, but otherwise inspires little in the way of crossover thrill or appeal. A convincing backdrop can’t completely save a narrative stuck somewhere between unapologetic pureblood retribution and something a bit more ambitious, just as neither can Jason Momoa — who has a certain snarling charisma that, combined with his well honed physique, nicely matches the needs of the part — or the wasted presence of Rachel Nichols. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 112 minutes)