SeeingEyeBlog

Is it just me or is it disturbing that Bryan Singer and company have changed Superman’s 70+ year old slogan “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to the moronic and postmodern version in this post’s title. In the screenwriters’ own words:

SUPERMAN’S motto, “Truth, justice and the American way,” has been rewritten in the new “Superman Returns” to “Truth, justice and . . . all that stuff.” Jeannie Wolf reports on Movies.com that screenwriters Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris wanted to avoid outdated jingoism. Dan: “I don’t think ‘the American way’ means what it meant in 1945.” Mike: “He’s not just for Metropolis and not just for America.” Dan: “He’s an alien, from Krypton; he has come to Earth to be kind of a savior for this world, not our country . . . And he has no papers.” Mike: “What would happen with the immigration laws we have now?” Dan: “I’d like to see someone kick him out!”

These are the same types of people (I know because I work with them all the time) who will turn around and say things like, “It’s just a movie,” when things get contraversial. It makes me sick when every film has to have a political commentary. If anything should be pure entertainment, it should be Superman. Politically-infused entertainment is as transparent as oxygen-infused water. It’s sophomoric and I don’t buy it. I’m getting very tired of the arrogance of writers like these (and studio executives), who just don’t understand the intelligence or values of their audience.

You can buy the rights to Superman’s iconography. You can use computers to make larger-than-life scenarios play out on the screen. But, like most post-modern art and culture, it doesn’t mean anything. Not after being stripped of the core values that made Jerry Siegel’s and Joe Schuster’s character great.

Political correctness is kryptonite. Resist it before it kills us all.

I haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie, but I’ve been looking at some astronomy sites, and it looks as though Mars is undergoing its own global warming. However, the evidence suggests that there are no private jets flying around on Mars, nor any SUVs, nor an over-abundance of carbon-based life forms to account for Martian global warming.

I’m not an expert, but I’m willing to bet that climate change is due in large part to natural shifts in planetary dynamics such as axial tilt angles. Maybe the whole solar system is globally warming due to the temperature of the sun. I’m not saying the evidence for global warming isn’t compelling, I’m just saying it’s not conclusive.

Continuing my back-and-white cinematography viewing, I watched tonight Schindler’s List, which was the first I viewed it since it came out, 13 years ago. It’s a film that hits like a ton of bricks, because, besides the obvious, it’s filmed in such a real way. The use of black and white as a metaphor for bondage or crushed hope.

In the beginning of the film, the color is heavily muted, a sign of waning hopes. A flame burns out and smoke rises as we fade to black and white–a visual metaphor for each life that faded away in the holocaust. After we get into the story, the next use of color is used to isolate a little girl in a red coat, who is somehow unaffected by the carnage around her–the resilience of children. Later, Schindler sees her body, still pure in color, at a mass grave. When he allows the workers to celebrate the Sabbath at the work camp near the end of the war, their candles burn with color, like a rekindling of the candles from the first scene.

In each scene, faces are rendered with unique light. Classic Rembrandt triangles, silhouettes, eyes highlighted or shadowed, backlights from below, and I noticed an even more ballsy choice a couple times: During a dolly move, a light that plays as a back-light at point A might be a side- or front-light at point B. Kaminski dims one source down while taking another source up, 30 degrees apart, keeping a constant back-light on the subject from the most useful angle. I had to rewind and watch again because I couldn’t believe it was happening. I even spotted a light gag where an extra crosses the beam of a back-light, and the light stays off afterwards, which corresponds to a dramatic beat. This much subtlety warrants another viewing, but it’s such a heavy film that it’s going to take a week or so.

This article is quite interesting, about houses of cinema replacing houses of worship in our modern age.

How can we cause a cinematic reformation in a Hollywood dominated by superfluous and gratuitous stories? Ralph Winter, producer of the X-Men series, tells Christianity Today:

[Christians] want to dot every “i” and cross every “t” and make sure it’s uber-clear what’s happened by the end of the story. We’ve lost the ability to create mystery and wonder.

Movies are not good at giving answers. Movies are great at asking questions. Movies that do that are lasting.

He’s right. To me, it’s frustrating to have to work on morally empty Hollywood projects. But frankly, it would be just as frustrating working on a mediocre, but well-intentioned, Christian script that dots every “i”. Hollywood is a big ship to tack. Why try to waste energy trying to turn on a dime?

There is virtue in subtlety, especially with cinema, and especially in this generation. An audience today can smell a sermon from a mile off, and they don’t think they like the smell. The trick with cinema, as it has been with all rhetoric I suppose, is ’sugar-coating the pill.’ But cinema is especially right for this job, being the beneficiary of the direct emotional influences of music, drama, photography, etc. It’s one thing when a character says something. It’s another when you dolly in with the camera. It’s quite another when the music swells while you’re pushing in. Cinema multiplies charisma, and charismatic people are influential.

By portraying it in a sympathetic light, a skilled filmmaker can make fuzzy logic or morally confused behavior seem quite the opposite (as is demonstrated weekly at the box office). It should stand to reason that the same can be done with sound logic and morally firm stories, given the same level of talent. I know the talent is here, it’s all a question of money.

Who wants to invest? Have camera. Accept credit card.

This 1967 film was shot by legendary director of photography Conrad L. Hall. He is famous for the above shot, visually expressing this murderer’s emotions using rain as an objective correlative. (Yes, I used ‘objective correlative’ in a sentence.) The rain flowing down the window creates shadows on Robert Blake’s face, which seem like tears as he remembers his childhood, minutes away from the gallows. Blake’s performance is so subtle, and he never sheds a tear. But you would swear he had as you watch the film. This performance seems to be an effective dress rehearsal for his real-life murder trial, but that’s for another time.

These “happy accidents” seem to follow Conrad Hall around like a lucky charm, as if he had his own secure channel to heaven. But getting happy accidents lies in the ability to realize when one is already occuring. In his own words, “Filmmaking is about finding things out, it’s about examining, it’s about discovering. You should approach your work in the same way that a child discovers new aspects of the world. I draw inspiration from absolutely everything around me, and what I observe from life. When you get to be a visual storyteller, you learn to watch how people behave and to see things – to study the light, to watch a field as you’re driving by it in a car. It’s like making movies 24 hours a day.”